HOUSE-WARMING. 
273 
faculties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuri¬ 
ously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor 
need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human 
race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut 
their threads any time with a little sharper blast from 
the north. "We go on dating from Cold Fridays and 
Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow, 
would put a period to man’s existence on the globe. 
The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for 
economy, since I did not own the forest; but it did not 
keep fire so well as the open fire-place. Cooking was 
then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a 
chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days 
of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, 
after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up 
room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, 
and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can al¬ 
ways see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into 
it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and 
earthiness which they have accumulated during the 
day. But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, 
and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with 
new force. — 
“ Never, bright flame, may be denied to me 
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy. 
What but my hopes shot upward e’er so bright ? 
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night ? 
Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall, 
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all ? 
Was thy existence then too fanciful 
For our life’s common light, who are so dull ? 
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold 
With our congenial souls ? secrets too bold ? 
18 
