I and My Chimney | Page 8

my chimney itself a tropic. A chair by my chimney in a November day is as good
for an invalid as a long season spent in Cuba. Often I think how grapes might ripen
against my chimney. How my wife's geraniums bud there! Bud in December. Her eggs,
too--can't keep them near the chimney, an account of the hatching. Ah, a warm heart has
my chimney.
How often my wife was at me about that projected grand entrance-hall of hers, which was
to be knocked clean through the chimney, from one end of the house to the other, and
astonish all guests by its generous amplitude. "But, wife," said I, "the chimney--consider
the chimney: if you demolish the foundation, what is to support the superstructure?" "Oh,
that will rest on the second floor." The truth is, women know next to nothing about the
realities of architecture. However, my wife still talked of running her entries and
partitions. She spent many long nights elaborating her plans; in imagination building her
boasted hall through the chimney, as though its high mightiness were a mere spear of
sorrel-top. At last, I gently reminded her that, little as she might fancy it, the chimney was
a fact--a sober, substantial fact, which, in all her plannings, it would be well to take into
full consideration. But this was not of much avail.
And here, respectfully craving her permission, I must say a few words about this
enterprising wife of mine. Though in years nearly old as myself, in spirit she is young as
my little sorrel mare, Trigger, that threw me last fall. What is extraordinary, though she

comes of a rheumatic family, she is straight as a pine, never has any aches; while for me
with the sciatica, I am sometimes as crippled up as any old apple-tree. But she has not so
much as a toothache. As for her hearing--let me enter the house in my dusty boots, and
she away up in the attic. And for her sight--Biddy, the housemaid, tells other people's
housemaids, that her mistress will spy a spot on the dresser straight through the pewter
platter, put up on purpose to hide it. Her faculties are alert as her limbs and her senses.
No danger of my spouse dying of torpor. The longest night in the year I've known her lie
awake, planning her campaign for the morrow. She is a natural projector. The maxim,
"Whatever is, is right," is not hers. Her maxim is, Whatever is, is wrong; and what is
more, must be altered; and what is still more, must be altered right away. Dreadful maxim
for the wife of a dozy old dreamer like me, who dote on seventh days as days of rest, and
out of a sabbatical horror of industry, will, on a week day, go out of my road a quarter of
a mile, to avoid the sight of a man at work.
That matches are made in heaven, may be, but my wife would have been just the wife for
Peter the Great, or Peter the Piper. How she would have set in order that huge littered
empire of the one, and with indefatigable painstaking picked the peck of pickled peppers
for the other.
But the most wonderful thing is, my wife never thinks of her end. Her youthful
incredulity, as to the plain theory, and still plainer fact of death, hardly seems Christian.
Advanced in years, as she knows she must be, my wife seems to think that she is to teem
on, and be inexhaustible forever. She doesn't believe in old age. At that strange promise
in the plain of Mamre, my old wife, unlike old Abraham's, would not have jeeringly
laughed within herself.
Judge how to me, who, sitting in the comfortable shadow of my chimney, smoking my
comfortable pipe, with ashes not unwelcome at my feet, and ashes not unwelcome all but
in my mouth; and who am thus in a comfortable sort of not unwelcome, though, indeed,
ashy enough way, reminded of the ultimate exhaustion even of the most fiery life; judge
how to me this unwarrantable vitality in my wife must come, sometimes, it is true, with a
moral and a calm, but oftener with a breeze and a ruffle.
If the doctrine be true, that in wedlock contraries attract, by how cogent a fatality must I
have been drawn to my wife! While spicily impatient of present and past, like a glass of
ginger-beer she overflows with her schemes; and, with like energy as she puts down her
foot, puts down her preserves and her pickles, and lives with them in a continual future;
or ever full of expectations both from time and space, is ever restless for newspapers, and
ravenous for letters. Content with the