I and My Chimney | Page 4

my superior; my superior, too, in that humbly bowing over with shovel and tongs, I much
minister to it; yet never does it minister, or incline over to me; but, if anything, in its
settlings, rather leans the other way. My chimney is grand seignior here--the one great
domineering object, not more of the landscape, than of the house; all the rest of which
house, in each architectural arrangement, as may shortly appear, is, in the most marked
manner, accommodated, not to my wants, but to my chimney's, which, among other
things, has the centre of the house to himself, leaving but the odd holes and corners to
me.
But I and my chimney must explain; and as we are both rather obese, we may have to
expatiate.
In those houses which are strictly double houses--that is, where the hall is in the
middle--the fireplaces usually are on opposite sides; so that while one member of the

household is warming himself at a fire built into a recess of the north wall, say another
member, the former's own brother, perhaps, may be holding his feet to the blaze before a
hearth in the south wall--the two thus fairly sitting back to back. Is this well? Be it put to
any man who has a proper fraternal feeling. Has it not a sort of sulky appearance? But
very probably this style of chimney building originated with some architect afflicted with
a quarrelsome family.
Then again, almost every modem fireplace has its separate flue--separate throughout,
from hearth to chimney-top. At least such an arrangement is deemed desirable. Does not
this look egotistical, selfish? But still more, all these separate flues, instead of having
independent masonry establishments of their own, or instead of being grouped together in
one federal stock in the middle of the house--instead of this, I say, each flue is
surreptitiously honey-combed into the walls; so that these last are here and there, or
indeed almost anywhere, treacherously hollow, and, in consequence, more or less weak.
Of course, the main reason of this style of chimney building is to economize room. In
cities, where lots are sold by the inch, small space is to spare for a chimney constructed
on magnanimous principles; and, as with most thin men, who are generally tall, so with
such houses, what is lacking in breadth, must be made up in height. This remark holds
true even with regard to many very stylish abodes, built by the most stylish of gentlemen.
And yet, when that stylish gentleman, Louis le Grand of France, would build a palace for
his lady, friend, Madame de Maintenon, he built it but one story high--in fact in the
cottage style. But then, how uncommonly quadrangular, spacious, and broad--horizontal
acres, not vertical ones. Such is the palace, which, in all its one-storied magnificence of
Languedoc marble, in the garden of Versailles, still remains to this day. Any man can buy
a square foot of land and plant a liberty-pole on it; but it takes a king to set apart whole
acres for a grand triannon.
But nowadays it is different; and furthermore, what originated in a necessity has been
mounted into a vaunt. In towns there is large rivalry in building tall houses. If one
gentleman builds his house four stories high, and another gentleman comes next door and
builds five stories high, then the former, not to be looked down upon that way,
immediately sends for his architect and claps a fifth and a sixth story on top of his
previous four. And, not till the gentleman has achieved his aspiration, not till he has
stolen over the way by twilight and observed how his sixth story soars beyond his
neighbor's fifth--not till then does he retire to his rest with satisfaction.
Such folks, it seems to me, need mountains for neighbors, to take this emulous conceit of
soaring out of them.
If, considering that mine is a very wide house, and by no means lofty, aught in the above
may appear like interested pleading, as if I did but fold myself about in the cloak of a
general proposition, cunningly to tickle my individual vanity beneath it, such
misconception must vanish upon my frankly conceding, that land adjoining my alder
swamp was sold last month for ten dollars an acre, and thought a rash purchase at that; so
that for wide houses hereabouts there is plenty of room, and cheap. Indeed so cheap--dirt
cheap--is the soil, that our elms thrust out their roots in it, and hang their great boughs
over it, in the most lavish and reckless way. Almost all our crops, too, are sown broadcast,
even peas and turnips. A farmer among us, who should go about his twenty-acre field,
poking his finger into it here and there,