The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 3,672 pages of information about The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner.

The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 3,672 pages of information about The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner.

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.  “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

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The Complete Project Gutenberg Writings of Charles Dudley Warner from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.