s. They did,
however, fortify themselves well with a daily draft of rum and they
wore a quantity of clothing that would be intolerable today. Further,
plenty of wood for fuel grew at their very door; it was part of the
normal farm work to cut it down and prepare it for the cavernous
fireplaces.

But then, as now, a fireplace could only heat a comparatively small
area. Further, under modern conditions, it is the most expensive heat
that can be generated. Even though your holding includes a good sized
wood-lot, the cost of labor for getting fuel cut, drawn, and piled in
your cellar may run to more than the same amount purchased from the
local coal yard.

If you have purchased an old house with no heating plant or are
building a new house, the type of heating used will largely depend on
what your architect considers practical and what you can pay for. The
chief systems, viewed in descending order of expense, are hot water,
steam, piped hot air, and the pipeless furnace. All of these can be
fitted to burn either coal or oil.

Provided one can meet the initial expense of purchase and
installation, the ideal system is probably the oil burning,
electrically run, hot water heating system. Barring the final
perfection of the robot, it is as near to a mechanical servant as one
is likely to get even in this age of invention. There is no shoveling
or sifting of ashes. There is no furnace shaking or stoking, no
puzzling over dampers. Periodically and for a price, a man comes and
fills the oil tank. A thermostat regulates the heat. You have only to
set it for the desired temperature and forget it.

There is just one flaw with this perfect system. It is dependent on
electricity. Let that fail and there is trouble. The fine copper
radiators, so efficient when all goes well, spring leaks if the water
in them freezes. A few years ago an unusually severe blizzard in the
North Atlantic states worked havoc with all of the modern devices.
Roads were blocked, telephone and electric service lines were down,
and even train service was impaired. One of our neighbors had built a
new house two or three years before and equipped it with practically
every appliance known to modern comfort, including an oil burner.

In a few short hours this blizzard had set him back more than a
century. Electricity, of course, failed and the heat in his fine
furnace dwindled and died. It grew colder and colder, ultimately
reaching twenty degrees below zero. A