The fireplace, as we said, is a window through which we look out upon
other scenes. We like to read of the small, bare room, with cobwebbed
ceiling and narrow window, in which the poor child of genius sits with
his magical pen, the master of a realm of beauty and enchantment.
I think the open fire does not kindle the imagination so much as it
awakens the memory; one sees the past in its crumbling embers and ashy
grayness, rather than the future. People become reminiscent and even
sentimental in front of it. They used to become something else in those
good old days when it was thought best to heat the poker red hot before
plunging it into the mugs of flip. This heating of the poker has been
disapproved of late years, but I do not know on what grounds; if one
is to drink bitters and gins and the like, such as I understand as good
people as clergymen and women take in private, and by advice, I do not
know why one should not make them palatable and heat them with his own
poker. Cold whiskey out of a bottle, taken as a prescription six times
a day on the sly, is n't my idea of virtue any more than the social
ancestral glass, sizzling wickedly with the hot iron. Names are so
confusing in this world; but things are apt to remain pretty much the
same, whatever we call them.
Perhaps as you look into the fireplace it widens and grows deep and
cavernous. The back and the jambs are built up of great stones, not
always smoothly laid, with jutting ledges upon which ashes are apt to
lie. The hearthstone is an enormous block of trap rock, with a surface
not perfectly even, but a capital place to crack butternuts on. Over
the fire swings an iron crane, with a row of pot-hooks of all lengths
hanging from it. It swings out when the housewife wants to hang on
the tea-kettle, and it is strong enough to support a row of pots, or a
mammoth caldron kettle on occasion. What a jolly sight is this fireplace
when the pots and kettles in a row are all boiling and bubbling over
the flame, and a roasting spit is turning in front! It makes a person
as hungry as one of Scott's novels. But the brilliant sight is in the
frosty morning, about daylight, when the fire is made. The coals are
raked open, the split sticks are piled up in openwork criss-crossing, as
high as the crane; and when the flame catches hold and roars up through
the interstices, it is like an out-of-door bonfire. Wood enough is
consumed in that morning sacrifice to cook the food of a Parisian family
for a year. How it roars up the wide chimney, sending into the air the
signal smoke and sparks which announce to the farming neighbors another
day cheerfully begun! The sleepiest boy in the world would get up in his
red flannel nightgown to see such a fire lighted, even if he dropped
to sleep again in his chair before the ruddy blaze. Then it is that the
house, which has shrunk and creaked all night in the pinching cold of
winter, begins to glow again and come to life. The thick frost melts
little by little on the small window-panes, and it is seen that the gray
dawn is breaking over the leagues of pallid snow. It is time to blow out
the candle, which has lost all its cheerfulness in the light of day. The
morning romance is over; the family is astir; and member after member
appears with the morning yawn, to stand before the crackling, fierce
conflagration. The daily round begins. The most hateful employment ever
invented for mortal man presents itself: the "chores" are to be done.
The boy who expects every morning to open into a new world finds that
to-day is like yesterday, but he believes to-morrow will be different.
And yet enough for him, for the day, is the wading in the snowdrifts, or
the sliding on the diamond-sparkling crust. Happy, too, is he, when the
storm rages, and the snow is piled high against the windows, if he can
sit in the warm chimney-corner and read about Burgoyne, and General
Fraser, and Miss McCrea, midwinter marches through the wilderness,
surprises of wigwams, and the stirring ballad, say, of the Battle of the
Kegs:--
"Come, gallants, attend and list a friend
Thrill forth harmonious ditty;
While I shall tell what late befell
At Philadelphia city."
I should like to know what heroism a boy in an old New England
farmhouse--rough-nursed by nature, and fed on the traditions of the old
wars did not aspire to. "John," says the mother, "You'll burn your head
to a crisp in that heat." But John does not hear; he is storming the
Plains of Abraham just now. "Johnny, dear, bring in a stick of wood."
How can Johnny bring in wood when he is in that defile with Braddock,
and the Indians are popping at him from behind every tree? There is
something about a boy that I like, after all.
The fire rests upon the broad hearth; the hearth rests upon a great
substruction of stone, and the substruction rests upon the cellar. What
supports the cellar I never knew, but the cellar supports the family.
The cellar is the foundation of domestic comfort. Into its dark,
cavernous recesses the child's imagination fearfully goes. Bogies guard
the bins of choicest apples. I know not what comical sprites sit astride
the cider-barrels ranged along the walls. The feeble flicker of the
tallow-candle does not at all dispel, but creates, illusions, and
magnifies all the rich possibilities of this underground treasure-house.
When the cellar-door is opened, and the boy begins to descend into the
thick darkness, it is always with a heart-beat as of one started upon
some adventure. Who can forget the smell that comes through the opened
door;--a mingling of fresh earth, fruit exhaling delicious aroma,
kitchen vegetables, the mouldy odor of barrels, a sort of ancestral
air,--as if a door had been opened into an old romance. Do you like it?
Not much. But then I would not exchange the remembrance of it for a good
many odors and perfumes that I do like.
It is time to punch the backlog and put on a new forestick.