Three sizes, remember — the 4-foot lengths for the long, low stove in the Big Room, 12-inch “chunks” for the oval sheet-iron stove in the parlor, and the fine-split 18-inch lengths for the kitchen. (Yes, they burned wood in the kitchen — not only wood, but oak and maple and hickory — the kind you buy by the carat nowadays!)

And what a fire it made!  Two sticks of the long wood in the stove in the Big Room, and the damper open, and you’d have to raise the windows inside of fifteen minutes no matter how low the thermometer registered outside.  In the kitchen grandmother did all her cooking with a wood fire — using the ashes for the lye barrel — and the feasts that came steaming from her famous oven have never been equalled on any gas-range ever made. (Gas-range! how grandmother would have sniffed in scorn at such a suggestion!) Even coal was only fit for the base burner in the family sitting-room — and that must be anthracite, or “hard” coal, the kind that comes in sacks nowadays at about the same price as butter and eggs.  And even the wood had to be split just so and be “clear” and right, or grandmother would scold grandfather for not wearing his near-seeing specs when he bought it.  “Guess they fooled you on that load, Mr. Van,” she’d say.  “It isn’t like the last we had.”

Don’t you remember how you were hanging around the kitchen one Saturday morning kind-a waiting for something to come within reach, and grandfather’s cane came tap-tapping down the long hall, and he pushed open the kitchen door and stood there, just inside the door, until the kettle started boiling over and making such a noise.  And then he announced that he thought he better go out and see if there was any wood in market. (As if there weren’t fifty farmers lined up there almost before daylight!) It was about nine o’clock and the sun had had a chance to warm things up a bit — so grandmother wrapped him up in his knitted muffler and away he went beneath his shiny silk hat.  And because you stood around and looked wistfully up at him, he finally turned back, just before he reached the big front door and said:  “Want to go along, Billie?” Of course you went, because there were all kinds of shops on the way up town to the wood market and grandfather always had an extra nickle for such occasions.

Can’t you just see that wood-market now, as it used to be in the Long Ago — with its big platform scales — and its wagons of accurately-piled cord-wood marked on the end of some stick with the white chalk-mark of the official “inspector” and measurer — and the farmers all bundled-up and tied-around with various cold-dispelling devices and big mitts and fur caps?  So far as you could tell then (or now, either, I’ll wager!) every load was exactly like every other load — but not so to grandfather, for he would scrutinize them all, sound them with his stick, barter and dicker and look out for knots — and then make the rounds again and do it all over before finally making his selection — and I distinctly remember feeling that the wood left in market after grandfather had made his selection wasn’t worth hauling away!