to the more ignorant strata.  If you want better common schools, raise the standard of the colleges, and so on.  Build your fire on top.  Let your light shine.  I have seen people build a fire under a balky horse; but he wouldn’t go, he’d be a horse-martyr first.  A fire kindled under one never did him any good.  Of course you can make a fire on the hearth by kindling it underneath, but that does not make it right.  I want my hearthfire to be an emblem of the best things.

II

It must be confessed that a wood-fire needs as much tending as a pair of twins.  To say nothing of fiery projectiles sent into the room, even by the best wood, from the explosion of gases confined in its cells, the brands are continually dropping down, and coals are being scattered over the hearth.  However much a careful housewife, who thinks more of neatness than enjoyment, may dislike this, it is one of the chief delights of a wood-fire.  I would as soon have an Englishman without side-whiskers as a fire without a big backlog; and I would rather have no fire than one that required no tending,—­one of dead wood that could not sing again the imprisoned songs of the forest, or give out in brilliant scintillations the sunshine it absorbed in its growth.  Flame is an ethereal sprite, and the spice of danger in it gives zest to the care of the hearth-fire.  Nothing is so beautiful as springing, changing flame,—­it was the last freak of the Gothic architecture men to represent the fronts of elaborate edifices of stone as on fire, by the kindling flamboyant devices.  A fireplace is, besides, a private laboratory, where one can witness the most brilliant chemical experiments, minor conflagrations only wanting the grandeur of cities on fire.  It is a vulgar notion that a fire is only for heat.  A chief value of it is, however, to look at.  It is a picture, framed between the jambs.  You have nothing on your walls, by the best masters (the poor masters are not, however, represented), that is really so fascinating, so spiritual.  Speaking like an upholsterer, it furnishes the room.  And it is never twice the same.  In this respect it is like the landscape-view through a window, always seen in a new light, color, or condition.  The fireplace is a window into the most charming world I ever had a glimpse of.

Yet direct heat is an agreeable sensation.  I am not scientific enough to despise it, and have no taste for a winter residence on Mount Washington, where the thermometer cannot be kept comfortable even by boiling.  They say that they say in Boston that there is a satisfaction in being well dressed which religion cannot give.  There is certainly a satisfaction in the direct radiance of a hickory fire which is not to be found in the fieriest blasts of a furnace.  The hot air of a furnace is a sirocco; the heat of a wood-fire is only intense sunshine, like that bottled in Lacrimae Christi.  Besides this, the eye is