The Wood Fire in No. 3

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

"I had been gunning all day," Pitkin repeated firmly, ignoring the Chronic Interrupter, "and had lost my way over the mountains. Just about dark I reached the valley and made for a small cabin with a curl of smoke coming out of the chimney. As I came nearer I got a whiff from a fry-pan that made me ravenous—one of those smells you never forget to your dying day. As I opened the gate I could see the glow of a fire in the stove, the smell getting stronger every minute. Inside, I found a man sitting in his shirt-sleeves by a table. The table had two plates on it, two knives, two forks, and two big china cups. Bending over the hot stove was his wife. She was stirring a large bowl filled to the brim with buckwheat batter. On the stove was a hot griddle and a fry-pan, and coiled in the fry-pan, trim as a rope coiled flat on a yacht's deck, lay a string of link sausages, with the bight of the line sticking up in the centre, like Mac's thumb.

"'Are you Pitkin's boy?' the man said, after I had explained.

"'Yes.'

"'Sit down and eat'

"The old man had two cakes, and I had two cakes. They were griddled in fours, and we both had a link of sausage with each instalment. I never moved from my chair until the tide-mark oh the bowl had gone down five inches, and the core of the sausages looked as if a solid shot had struck it. That smell! and the way it all tasted, and the little brown frazzlings around the edges of the celestial cakes, and the sizzlings of fat on the sausages, and the boiling hot coffee that washed it all down! Oh, go to with your Delmonico dishes! Give me the days of my youth! If I had but four breaths left in me, and if somebody should pass that pan of sausages under my nose, I could rise up and whip my weight in wild-cats. And yet that smell doesn't bring to my memory the way my hunger was satisfied, or how the food tasted. What I recall is the low-ceiled room, and the glow of the fire; the warmth and comfort everywhere, and the high light on the old Frau's face bending over her griddle. You'd just love to have painted that old woman, Mac."

The Hollander had listened quietly and without comment, both to Lonnegan's chaff and to Pitkin's enthusiastic recital.

"Ah, yes, you are quite right, Mr. Pitkin; after all, it is the imagination that is fed, not the stomach."

The measured tones of the speaker's voice at once commanded attention; even Boggs twisted his head to catch his words:

"It is his imagination, too, which suffers when a man loses his money and becomes poor. What he misses most, then, is not his horses and carriages and fine houses; it is his table, and the clean napkins and the linen, and hot plates and the quite thin glasses. Is it not so? I can think of nothing more satisfying than a well-appointed table, with the servants about and the dishes properly served, and with the flowers, silver, and glass, the better wines coming later, the coffee and cigar at the end. And I can think of nothing more pitiful than for a man who has had all this, to be obliged to stand at a cheap counter and eat a cheap sandwich. My father used to tell me a story about the spendthrift son of an old baron who lived in my town, by the name of De Ruyter, and who spent in just two years every guilder his father left him. Then came roulette, and at last he was a tout for gaming-houses—so poor that he had but one coat to his back. All this time, having been born a gentleman, he managed to keep himself clean, his clothes brushed and mended, and his shirt and collar ironed. That is quite difficult for a man who is poor.

"One day an old friend of his dead father's, a very rich man, took pity on him, and asked him to call at his house so that he might arrange to get him work. He received him in his library and rang for cigars and brandy, which his servant brought on a silver plate. The brandy the poor fellow drank, but the cigar he begged permission to put in his pocket and smoke later in the day. It was one of those great cigars the rich Hollanders smoke, about as long as your hand and thick like two fingers. This one had a little band around it, with the coat of arms of the gentleman stamped in gold; not a cigar you can buy even in Amsterdam, but a cigar made especially for very big customers like this one.