82 THE GARDENER. [Feb. 



fire is well burned down, take the shovel or soot -hoe and push as 

 much of the fire as you can back to the further end of the furnace. If 

 there are any clinkers, they will probably be run together in a cake 

 all over the bars. If it is cool and strong enough to be got out whole, 

 so much the better. To do this, insert the instrument provided for 

 this purpose under it at one side, turn it right over so as to leave all 

 the hot ashes, and lift it out, balancing it on the bent end of your 

 iron. When clinkers do not come out whole, the pieces must be 

 picked out as well as possible and placed on one side at once, so as to 

 avoid, as far as possible, having to breathe the sulphur emitted by 

 them while finishing your operations. If the fire is not sufficiently 

 burned down to admit of this being done, do not poke it up, as fifty 

 per cent of men do, breaking the clinkers up and mixing them with 

 the cinders, from which it is impossible to separate them ; but insert 

 the poker parallel with the bars, and work it backward and forward 

 without using it as a lever to disturb the fire in any way, but simply 

 dislodge the ashes, and so admit air. When coal is used, and has got 

 caked over, break it a little, and leave it till it is burned down, when 

 the clinkers may be taken out. Some young men keep continually 

 stirring at their fire till they get it half full of small clinkers, which 

 generally ends in its being found out some morning when it can be 

 least spared. Coals such as are used for this purpose do require a 

 certain amount of stirring, but a coke-fire should never be stirred 

 except in the manner above described. Slow combustion stoves are 

 perhaps the worst form of boiler to keep clear of clinkers, because of 

 the smallness of the furnace-door. The best plan I find is to get a 

 J- or f-inch iron rod with 3 inches of its length bent at right angles 

 and slightly flattened, open both furnace and ashpit doors, insert the 

 bent end of this rod between the bars from below and pull it for- 

 ward, allowing the ashes, cinders, and clinkers to fall out at the 

 former, when the cinders can be separated from the clinkers and ashes 

 and returned to the furnace. If this is done morning and evening 

 these useful little boilers are very little trouble, and answer their pur- 

 pose very well indeed. 



Clemiing. — Cleaning is a very important matter, much more so when 

 coal is the fuel employed. There are some boilers that virtually clean 

 themselves, such as the Upright Tubular and Slow Combustion 

 class, where the whole of the heating surface is exposed to the direct 

 action of the fire. It is, however, a very diflferent matter when you 

 have a series of horizontal flues or smoke-tubes in connection with a 

 boiler. It is of the greatest importance for the man who has to keep 

 a boiler clean that he knows every turn the smoke has to take, from 

 where it leaves the furnace till it enters the chimney. Without this 

 knowledge he is like a man groping in the dark in a strange place. 

 Cleaning should be done twice or three times a-week, as it is found 

 necessary, and the proper time to do it is before the fire is disturbed 



