_System Adapted to the Small House_
The heating problem for the small house was for our ancestors a very
simple mechanical device, consisting, as we all know, of either the
fireplace or the stove. The former method still has a charm which we
are not willing to dispense with, although we do not depend upon its
efficiency to do the actual work of warming, but install some more
complicated system, such as a steam heating-plant, to perform the
practical work. A fireplace has a sentimental and intellectual warmth
that no radiator can supply.
Even the stove has a certain fascination for many, recalling cold
wintry nights when the family sat about the red-hot casting, the women
knitting and the men burning their shoe-leather and smoking. Some
advocates of the stove are so energetic in their arguments concerning
the efficiency of this method of heating that one almost doubts the
defects which lead inventors to manufacture other devices. But the
housewife knows the labor of shovelling coal into three or four
stoves, knows the great clouds of hot, fine ashes which rise into the
atmosphere and settle upon the shelves, the tops of picture-frames, and
the polished surface of the piano.
[Illustration: Warm-Air Furnace with Pipes