THE OPEN WOOD FIRE. 



57 



companion for myself in the light of beech and oak 

 and hickory in many and many a woody dingle, and 

 perchance have broiled a squirrel or a bird for break- 

 fast: but never, and nowhere else, have I enjoyed the 

 real and genuine and lasting comfort of a wood fire 

 so thoroughly as right back here at the old homestead, 

 before the huge old mossy backlog and flaming fore- 

 sticks. Ah, how the delight of it lingers — and lingers ! 



Homer tells us, in a realistic picture, in the 

 *'Odyssey," that, when Hermes reached Calypso's cave, 

 "on the hearth was a great fire burning, and from afar 

 through the isles was smelt the fragrance of cleft cedar 

 blazing, and of sandal wood." Theocritus, too, that 

 old Greek lover of the open air and the best things life 

 has for us, loved the charm of the wood fire. It was 

 beside such a hearth that Menalcas, the shepherd, re- 

 clined, in his song in the ninth idyl, with fleeces from 

 his ewes and goats beneath him, in his cave : 



"In the fire of oak-faggots puddings are hissing-hot, and 

 dry beech-nuts roast therein, in the wintry weather, and, truly, 

 for the winter season I care not even so much as a toothless 

 man does for walnuts, when rich pottage is beside him." 



And for this, his song, he received from ^tna the 

 gift of a horn made of a spiral shell. 



^sop saw fit to make the hearth the scene of one 

 of his fables, in which a countryman finds a freezing 

 snake and brings it in before the fire; upon which the 

 snake, at its recovery, attacks the villager's wife and 

 children, and is summarily dispatched for its ingrati- 



