here the thermometer cannot be kept comfortable even by
boiling. They say that they say in Boston that there is a satisfaction
in being well dressed which religion cannot give. There is certainly a
satisfaction in the direct radiance of a hickory fire which is not to be
found in the fieriest blasts of a furnace. The hot air of a furnace is
a sirocco; the heat of a wood-fire is only intense sunshine, like that
bottled in Lacrimae Christi. Besides this, the eye is delighted, the
sense of smell is regaled by the fragrant decomposition, and the ear is
pleased with the hissing, crackling, and singing,--a liberation of
so many out-door noises. Some people like the sound of bubbling in a
boiling pot, or the fizzing of a frying-spider. But there is nothing
gross in the animated crackling of sticks of wood blazing on the earth,
not even if chestnuts are roasting in the ashes. All the senses are
ministered to, and the imagination is left as free as the leaping
tongues of flame.

The attention which a wood-fire demands is one of its best
recommendations. We value little that which costs us no trouble to
maintain. If we had to keep the sun kindled up and going by private
corporate action, or act of Congress, and to be taxed for the support of
customs officers of solar heat, we should prize it more than we do. Not
that I should like to look upon the sun as a job, and have the proper
regulation of its temperature get into politics, where we already have
so much combustible stuff; but we take it quite too much as a matter
of course, and, having it free, do not reckon it among the reasons for
gratitude. Many people shut it out of their houses as if it were an
enemy, watch its descent upon the carpet as if it were only a thief of
color, and plant trees to shut it away from the mouldering house. All
the animals know better than this, as well as the more simple races of
men; the old women of the southern Italian coasts sit all day in the sun
and ply the distaff, as grateful as the sociable hens on the south side
of a New England barn; the slow tortoise likes to take the sun upon his
sloping back, soaking in color that shall make him immortal when the
imperishable part of him is cut up into shell ornaments. The capacity
of a cat to absorb sunshine is only equaled by that of an Arab or an
Ethiopian. They are not afraid of injuring their complexions.

White must be the color of civilization; it has so many natural
disadvantages. But this is