Backlog Studies | Page 9

"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.

SECOND STUDY
I
The log was white birch. The beautiful satin bark at once kindled into a
soft, pure, but brilliant flame, something like that of naphtha. There is
no other wood flame so rich, and it leaps up in a joyous, spiritual way,
as if glad to burn for the sake of burning. Burning like a clear oil, it has
none of the heaviness and fatness of the pine and the balsam.
Woodsmen are at a loss to account for its intense and yet chaste flame,
since the bark has no oily appearance. The heat from it is fierce, and the
light dazzling. It flares up eagerly like young love, and then dies away;
the wood does not keep up the promise of the bark. The woodsmen, it
is proper to say, have not considered it in its relation to young love. In
the remote settlements the pine-knot is still the torch of courtship; it
endures to sit up by. The birch-bark has alliances with the world of
sentiment and of letters. The most poetical reputation of the North
American Indian floats in a canoe made of it; his picture-writing was
inscribed on it. It is the paper that nature furnishes for lovers in the
wilderness, who are enabled to convey a delicate sentiment by its use,
which is expressed neither in their ideas nor chirography. It is
inadequate for legal parchment, but does very well for deeds of love,
which are not meant usually to give a perfect title. With care, it may be

split into sheets as thin as the Chinese paper. It is so beautiful to handle
that it is a pity civilization cannot make more use of it. But fancy
articles manufactured from it are very much like all ornamental work
made of nature's perishable seeds, leaves, cones, and dry
twigs,--exquisite while the pretty fingers are fashioning it, but soon
growing shabby and cheap to the eye. And yet there is a pathos in
"dried things," whether they are displayed as ornaments in some
secluded home, or hidden religiously in bureau drawers where profane
eyes cannot see how white ties are growing yellow and ink is fading
from treasured letters, amid a faint and discouraging perfume of ancient
rose-leaves.
The birch log holds out very well while it is green, but has not
substance enough for a backlog when dry. Seasoning green timber or
men is always an experiment. A man may do very well in a simple, let
us say, country or backwoods line of life, who would come to nothing
in a more complicated civilization. City life is a severe trial. One man
is struck with a dry-rot; another develops season-cracks; another
shrinks and swells with every change of circumstance. Prosperity is
said to be more trying than adversity, a theory which most people are
willing to accept without trial; but few men stand the drying out of the
natural sap of their greenness in the artificial heat of city life. This, be it
noticed, is nothing against the drying and seasoning process; character
must be put into the crucible some time, and why not in this world? A
man who cannot stand seasoning will not have a high market value in
any part of the universe. It is creditable to the