64 



AROUND AN OLD HOMESTEAD. 



In summer; and when dead, its burning wood 



Will foster sweetness in the poet's mood, 



And hum upon his hearth, and help his song. 



Its death is like the day's, for still it throws 



Its roseate light lingering around our rooms; 



As slow the fire its last of life consumes, 



It sinks to embers like to sunset snows, 



And dying, even in its ashes, glows 



With bright remembrance of its spring-time blooms." 



The open hearth, of course, suggests the camp-fire 

 of out-doors. Dr. W. C. Gray and Mr. John Bur- 

 roughs both think — and is it a mere fancy? — that we 

 have carried the wood fire indoors with us from our 

 primeval, open-air hfe of ages past. Mr. Burroughs 

 says that the "primitive man" in him wakes up at once 

 at the smell of smoke, "and all his old love of fire, and 

 dependence upon it, in the camp or the cave, comes 

 freshly to mind." Mr. Bradford Torrey, too, believes 

 that, since we "have not always lived in houses," our 

 feeling of attraction for a fire "is but part of an an- 

 cestral inheritance. We have come by it honestly, as 

 the phrase is." Nor, as we, in our time, with our fire 

 in the woods, look and observe the flames dart heaven- 

 ward in aspiration, can we but rejoice that there have 

 been at least some fire-worshipers among the pagan, 

 for it brought them to the beginnings of mystery and 

 of adoration. 



The camp-fire, of course, brings instinctively to 

 mind the curl of smoke from wigwam or tepee, and 

 is the symbol of the life of the plains — the council, the 

 pipe of peace, the feast of buffalo and venison — in the 

 native home of the American Indian. I bethink me 

 also of the countless camp-fires of the armies of the 

 earth, in the long history of war; and no man who 



