We never had a coal stove around the house until last Saturday. Have
always used pine slabs and pieces of our neighbor's fence. They burn
well, too, but the fence got all burned up, and the neighbor said he
wouldn't build a new one, so we went down to Jones' and got a coal
stove.
You see, we didn't know anything about coal stoves. We filled the stove
about half full of pine fence, and, when the stuff got well to going, we
filled the artesian well on the top with coal. It simmered and sputtered
about five or ten minutes, and all went out, and we put on an overcoat
and a pair of buckskin mittens and “went out too”--to supper. We
remarked, in the course of the frugal meal, that Jones was a “froad” for
recommending such a confounded refrigerator to a man to get warm by.
After supper we took a piece of ice and rubbed our hands warm, and went
in where that stove was, resolved to make her draw and burn if it took
all the pine fence in the First Ward. Our better-half threw a quilt
over her, and shiveringly remarked that she never knew what real solid
comfort was until she got a coal stove.
Stung by the sarcasm in her remark, we turned every dingus on the stove
that was movable, or looked like it had anything to do with the draft,
and pretty soon the stove began to heave up heat. It was not long before
she stuttered like the new Silsby steamer. Talk about your heat! In
ten minutes that room was as much worse than a Turkish bath as Hades is
hotter than Liverman's ice-house. The perspiration fairly fried out of
a tin water cooler in the next room. We opened the doors, and snow began
to melt as far up Vine street as Hanscombe's house, and people all
round the neighborhood put on linen clothes. And we couldn't stop the
confounded thing.
We forgot what Jones told us about the dampers, and she kept a biling.
The only thing we could do was to go to bed, and leave the thing to burn
the house up if it wanted to. We stood off with a pole and turned the
damper every way, and at every turn she just sent out heat enough to
roast an ox. We went to bed, supposing that the coal would eventually
burn out, but about 12 o'clock the whole family had to get up and sit on
the fence.
Finally a man came along who had been brought up among coal stoves, and
he put a wet blanket over him and crept up to the stove and turned the
proper dingus, and she cooled off, and since that time has been just as
comfortable as possible. If you buy a coal stove you want to learn how
to engineer it, or you may get roasted.