klog had been reduced to a heap of fiery embers, then
was the time for listening to sailor yarns and ghost and witch legends.
The wonder seems somehow to have faded out of those tales of eld since
the gleam of red-hot coals died away from the hearthstone. The shutting
up of the great fireplaces and the introduction of stoves marks an era;
the abdication of shaggy Romance and the enthronement of elegant
Commonplace--sometimes, alas! the opposite of elegant--at the New
England fireside.

Have we indeed a fireside any longer in the old sense? It hardly seems
as if the young people of to-day can really understand the poetry of
English domestic life, reading it, as they must, by a reflected
illumination from the past. What would "Cotter's Saturday Night" have
been, if Burns had written it by the opaque heat of a stove instead of
at his

"Wee bit ingle blinkin' bonnilie?"

New England as it used to be was so much like Scotland in many of its
ways of doing and thinking, that it almost seems as if that tender poem
of hearth-and-home life had been written for us too. I can see the
features of my father, who died when I was a little child, whenever I
read the familiar verse:--

"The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face
They round the ingle form a circle wide:
The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride."

A grave, thoughtful face his was, lifted up so grandly amid that
blooming semicircle of boys and girls, all gathered silently in the
glow of the ruddy firelight! The great family Bible had the look upon
its leathern covers of a book that bad never been new, and we honored
it the more for its apparent age. Its companion was the Westminster
Assembly's and Shorter Catechism, out of which my father asked us
questions on Sabbath afternoons, when the tea-table had been cleared.
He ended the exercise with a prayer, standing up with his face turned
toward the wall. My most vivid recollection of his living face is as I
saw it reflected in a mirror while he stood thus praying. His closed
eyes, the paleness and seriousness of his countenance, awed me. I never
forgot that look. I saw it but once again, when, a child of six or
seven years, I was lifted to a footstool beside his coffin to gaze upon
his face for the last time. It wore the same expression that it did in
prayer; paler, but no longer care-worn; so peaceful, so noble! They
left me standing there a long time, and I could