out pulling the plates off the chimney.

Then the heating fire-box is furnished with blazing pine splinters and
an armful of pine stove-wood and left alone for about an hour or until
all the wood is burnt to a smokeless and gasless mass of hot coals and
fine ash. The damper plate is then replaced, which stops all escape of
heat up the chimney, and the whole structure of the stove soon begins to
radiate a gentle heat. Except in the coldest of weather it is not
necessary to renew the fire in such a stove more than once daily, and
one armful of wood is the standard fuel consumption at each firing.

Another of the fire-boxes in the main stove is a large smooth-floored
and vaulted opening with a little front porch roofed by a hood leading
into the chimney. This is the oven, and here on baking days is built a
fire which is raked out when the walls and floor are heated and is
followed by the loaves and pastry put in place with a flat wooden paddle
with a long handle. See the picture of the stove and the pie coming out
of the oven in the American convalescent hospital in Archangel. The
third fire-box is often in a low section of the stove covered by an iron
plate, and is used only for boiling, broiling and frying. As there is
not much food broiled or fried, and as soup and other boiled food is
often allowed to simmer in stone jars in the oven, the iron-covered
fire-box is not infrequently left cold except in summer. The
stove-structure itself is variously contrived as to outward architecture
so as to leave one or more alcoves, the warm floors of which form
comfortable bed-spaces. The outer surface of the stove is smoothly
cemented or enameled. So large are these stoves that partition-logs are
set in grooves left in the outer stove-wall, and a portion of the wall
of each of four or five rooms is often formed by a side or corner of the
same stove. And radiation from the warm bricks heats the rooms.

Washing of clothes is done by two processes, soaping and rubbing in hot
water at home and rinsing and rubbing in cold water at the river-bank or
through a hole cut in the ice in the winter. Although the result may
please the eye, it frequently offends the nose because of the common use
of "fish-oil soap." Not only was there dead fish in the soap but also a
mixture of petroleum residue. No wonder the soldier-poet doggereled

"It's the horns of the cootie and beg-bug,
The herring and mud-colored crows,
My strongest impression of Russ