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.

Perhaps as you look into the fireplace it widens and grows deep and cavernous.  The back and the jambs are built up of great stones, not always smoothly laid, with jutting ledges upon which ashes are apt to lie.  The hearthstone is an enormous block of trap rock, with a surface not perfectly even, but a capital place to crack butternuts on.  Over the fire swings an iron crane, with a row of pot-hooks of all lengths hanging from it.  It swings out when the housewife wants to hang on the tea-kettle, and it is strong enough to support a row of pots, or a mammoth caldron kettle on occasion.  What a jolly sight is this fireplace when the pots and kettles in a row are all boiling and bubbling over the flame, and a roasting spit is turning in front!  It makes a person as hungry as one of Scott’s novels.  But the brilliant sight is in the frosty morning, about daylight, when the fire is made.  The coals are raked open, the split sticks are piled up in openwork criss-crossing, as high as the crane; and when the flame catches hold and roars up through the interstices, it is like an out-of-door bonfire.  Wood enough is consumed in that morning sacrifice to cook the food of a Parisian family for a year.  How it roars up the wide chimney, sending into the air the signal smoke and sparks which announce to the farming neighbors another day cheerfully begun!  The sleepiest boy in the world would get up in his red flannel nightgown to see such a fire lighted, even if he dropped to sleep again in his chair before the ruddy blaze.  Then it is that the house, which has shrunk and creaked all night in the pinching cold of winter, begins to glow again and come to life.  The thick frost melts little by little on the small window-panes, and it is seen that the gray dawn is breaking over the leagues of pallid snow.  It is time to blow out the candle, which has lost all its cheerfulness in the light of day.  The morning romance is over; the family is astir; and member after member appears with the morning yawn, to stand before the crackling, fierce conflagration.  The daily round begins.  The most hateful employment ever invented for mortal man presents itself:  the “chores” are to be done.  The boy who expects every morning to open into a new world finds that to-day is like yesterday, but he believes to-morrow will be different.  And yet enough for him, for the day, is the wading in the snowdrifts, or the sliding on the diamond-sparkling crust.  Happy, too, is he, when the storm rages, and the snow is piled high against the windows, if he can sit in the warm chimney-corner and read about Burgoyne, and General Fraser, and Miss McCrea, midwinter marches through the wilderness, surprises of wigwams, and the stirring ballad, say, of the Battle of the Kegs:—­

   “Come, gallants, attend and list a friend
   Thrill forth harmonious ditty;
   While I shall tell what late befell
   At Philadelphia city.”

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