e say I dimly wondered by what blessed
dispensation this creature was allowed in a domain so peaceful as my
nursery. I do not think I ever needed to be warned against scaling the
fender. I knew by instinct that the creature within it was
dangerous--fiercer still than the cat which had once strayed into the
room and scratched me for my advances. As I grew older, I ceased to
wonder at the creature's presence and learned to call it 'the fire,'
quite lightly. There are so many queer things in the world that we have
no time to go on wondering at the queerness of the things we see
habitually. It is not that these things are in themselves less queer
than they at first seemed to us. It is that our vision of them has been
dimmed. We are lucky when by some chance we see again, for a fleeting
moment, this thing or that as we saw it when it first came within our
ken. We are in the habit of saying that 'first impressions are best,'
and that we must approach every question 'with an open mind'; but we
shirk the logical conclusion that we were wiser in our infancy than we
are now. 'Make yourself even as a little child' we often say, but
recommending the process on moral rather than on intellectual grounds,
and inwardly preening ourselves all the while on having 'put away
childish things,' as though clarity of vision were not one of them.

I look around the room I am writing in--a pleasant room, and my own,
yet how irresponsive, how smug and lifeless! The pattern of the
wallpaper blamelessly repeats itself from wainscote to cornice; and the
pictures are immobile and changeless within their glazed frames--faint,
flat mimicries of life. The chairs and tables are just as their
carpenter fashioned them, and stand with stiff obedience just where
they have been posted. On one side of the room, encased in coverings of
cloth and leather, are myriads of words, which to some people, but not
to me, are a fair substitute for human company. All around me, in fact,
are the products of modern civilisation. But in the whole room there
are but three things living: myself, my dog, and the fire in my grate.
And of these lives the third is very much the most intensely vivid. My
dog is descended, doubtless, from prehistoric wolves; but you could
hardly decipher his pedigree on his mild, domesticated face. My dog is
as tame as his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the old
cavemen). But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing as when
Promethe