His boyhood certainly had no wide field of vision, no distant horizon, as regards his sleeping quarters. In building the cottage a bathroom on the first floor had been added to one side of it as a last luxurious afterthought. If you stood before the cottage and looked it squarely in the face, the bathroom protruded on one side like a badly swollen jaw. The building-plan when worked out, had involved expense beyond the calculation, as usually happens, and this had threatened the Salary: the extra bath, therefore, remained unrealised. Webster always asked at least one question about everything new and untried, and when old enough to be put there to sleep, he had looked around the cramped enclosure and inquired why it had been built. Thus he learned that in the family he had now taken the place of the Bath That Failed. It caused him a queer feeling as to his general repute in the neighbourhood that the very sight of him might bring to any observer's mind thoughts of a missing tub.
His window opened upon a few feet of yard. Just over the fence was the kitchen window of the cottage next in the row. When that window was open, Webster had to see the kitchen table and the preparation for meals. He violently disliked the sight of the preparations. If the window was closed, tidings as to what was going on reached him through another sense; his bedroom-bathroom became as a whispering gallery of cooking odours. But their own kitchen was just across a narrow hall, and fragrances from it occasionally mingled with those from the kitchen over the fence. Made hungry by nasal intelligence of something appetising, Webster would sometimes hurriedly dress and follow his pointer into the breakfast room, only to find that he was on a false trail: what he had expected to get his share of was being consumed by the family next door. He no longer had confidence, so to speak, in his own nose--not as a leading authority on meals to be eaten by him.
One beautiful use his window had, one glorious use, one enchantment. In the depth of winter sometimes of mornings when he got out of bed and went to open the shutter, on the window panes would be a forest of glittering trees. The first time he beheld such a forest, he stood before it spell-bound: wondering whether there were silvery birds singing far off amid the silvery boughs and what wild frost-creatures crouched in the tall stiff frost-grass. From the ice-forests on his window panes his thoughts always returned to the green summer forest on the distant horizon.