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Show wails, as much in fear and shame as in pain, until Mother called a halt. But I still cherish that lesson. Next time I didn't commit much of a crime and I didn't suffer dire punishment. But because Father was increasingly unwell I should have been more considerate. Even now I feel twinges of conscience. Always full of ideas he had decided to try raising the medicinal herb, ginseng, in our spacious backyard. He hired carpenters to construct many panels, about three by six feet, of laths spaced an inch apart. His purpose was to provide the young ginseng plants with something like the mingled shade and sun of a forest. He intended to use the panels on sides and roof of a widespreading shed. Father's recurring illness caused him to delay employing men to till the soil, plant the ginseng and erect the sheltering shed. The panels lay back of the house in a score of piles. It seemed a pity to watch them weather-gray in sun and rain without being used. I stood a few of them up to make small cabins. I'd tie them together at the corners with twine and lay others over the top for roofs. Why it was I don't know but one day the idea suddenly caught fire, figuratively. A dozen of my friends joined me. Other boys I knew slightly or not at all flocked in. I felt like the superintendent of a large project as the squads gleaned cords and bits of rope, even rags, and fastened more and more panels together into rooms and halls. Our construction-we grandiosely called it our Castle-spread farther and farther. There was no overall design. H.alf a dozen boys would start a wing on their own plan. The ramshackle affair straggled haphazardly across the alley and onto edges of adjoining lots where some boys thought they had permission to expand. Some didn't care. By six o'clock when Father came home, he must have been startled. He surely couldn't have expected to see a raffish, rambling, teetering one-story structure with several wings and many small annexes staggering and reeling drunkenly over a wide area, |
