Backlog Studies | Page 8

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.