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.
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.
[Illustration: TURNING THE PROPER DINGUS.]
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 got to learn how to
engineer it, or you may get roasted.