STAIRWAYS
Some years ago I built a house in which I settled, with my spouse. It was a gorgeous shack, indeed; the kind of house of which you read. For such a house I’d always yearned, and so I said, “Expense be derned! I want the best that coin will buy; my dwelling place must stack up high. I want a dwelling that will stand till I’m so old I should be canned.”
I said, “I want a splendid stair, a stairway that’s beyond compare; the kind you read about in books, with banisters and window nooks.”
And so we built a noble stair, and it was surely passing fair; and guests who came to spend the night, when viewing it, expressed delight, and said it surely took the cake; it was a bird, and no mistake.
But when the stair was five years old its antics made my trilbys cold. It warped and twisted like the deuce, till half the steps and rails were loose, it creaked and crackled, as in pain, and warped and bent and warped again. It took a circus acrobat to climb my stairway after that.
Then came a neighbor to my door, who’d built a hundred shacks or more. He viewed my stair and shed some weeps, and said, “That is a frost, for keeps. You’d better take it out from there and get yourself a Curtis stair. The wood the Curtis people use will ne’er its right proportions lose; it will not wind around, I wist, like some dadblamed contortionist. For it is seasoned to a hair; there is no reckless guesswork there.
“The Curtis trademark on a stair just means that grief won’t travel there. You have a stairway that will last until your earthly woes are past, and you are playing golden lyres, or heaping brimstone on the fires.
“Your warped old stairway yet will wreck some fellow’s back or break his neck, so pull it down, I humbly beg, before there is a broken leg. Then get the Curtis seasoned wood, and have a stairway staunch and good, and you will bless me every day for showing you the proper way.”
And now a noble Curtis stair adds grace and comfort to my lair; I never find it on the blink, it doesn’t warp or split or shrink.