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One evening Euphemia and I were sitting, rather disconsolately, in our room, and I was reading out the advertisements of country board in a newspaper, searching for a home, when in rushed Dr. Heare – one of our old friends. He was so full of something that he had to say that he didn’t even ask us how we were. In fact, he didn’t appear to want to know. I tell you what it is, said he, I have found just the very thing you want. A canal-boat. To live in? A canal-boat for a home? We sat up until twenty minutes past two, talking about that house. We ceased to call it a boat at about a quarter of eleven. The next day I took the boat and paid a month’s rent in advance. Three days afterward we moved into it. One of our earliest subjects of discussion was the name of our homestead. We found it no easy matter to select an appropriate title. I proposed a number of appellations intended to suggest the character of our home. Among these were: Safe Ashore,
Firmly Grounded, but Euphemia did not fancy any of them. Partitionville she objected to, and Gangplank Terrace did not suit her because it suggested convicts going out to work. At last, after days of talk and cogitation, we named our house Rudder Grange. To be sure, it wasn’t exactly a grange, but then it had such an enormous rudder that the justice of that part of the title seemed to overbalance any little inaccuracy in the other portion…
