and list a friend
Thrill forth harmonious ditty;
While I shall tell what late befell
At Philadelphia city."

I should like to know what heroism a boy in an old New England
farmhouse--rough-nursed by nature, and fed on the traditions of the old
wars did not aspire to. "John," says the mother, "You'll burn your head
to a crisp in that heat." But John does not hear; he is storming the
Plains of Abraham just now. "Johnny, dear, bring in a stick of wood."
How can Johnny bring in wood when he is in that defile with Braddock,
and the Indians are popping at him from behind every tree? There is
something about a boy that I like, after all.

The fire rests upon the broad hearth; the hearth rests upon a great
substruction of stone, and the substruction rests upon the cellar. What
supports the cellar I never knew, but the cellar supports the family.
The cellar is the foundation of domestic comfort. Into its dark,
cavernous recesses the child's imagination fearfully goes. Bogies guard
the bins of choicest apples. I know not what comical sprites sit astride
the cider-barrels ranged along the walls. The feeble flicker of the
tallow-candle does not at all dispel, but creates, illusions, and
magnifies all the rich possibilities of this underground treasure-house.
When the cellar-door is opened, and the boy begins to descend into the
thick darkness, it is always with a heart-beat as of one started upon
some adventure. Who can forget the smell that comes through the opened
door;--a mingling of fresh earth, fruit exhaling delicious aroma,
kitchen vegetables, the mouldy odor of barrels, a sort of ancestral
air,--as if a door had been opened into an old romance. Do you like it?
Not much. But then I would not exchange the remembrance of it for a good
many odors and perfumes that I do like.

It is time to punch the backlog and put on a new forestick.

SECOND STUDY

I

The log was white birch. The beautiful satin bark at once kindled into
a soft, pure, but brilliant flame, something like that of naphtha. There
is no other wood flame so rich, and it leaps up in a joyous, spiritual
way, as if glad to burn for the sake of burning. Burning like a clear
oil, it has none of the heaviness and fatness of the pine and the
balsam. Woodsmen are at a loss to account for its intense and yet
chaste flame, since the bark has no oily appearance. The heat from it
is fierce, and the light dazzling. It flares up eagerly like young