The Wood Fire in No. 3

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

It was a great day when Mac's fireplace was completed. Everybody crowded in to see it—not only the men from below and on the same floor, but half a dozen and more cronies from the outside. No one believed Lonnegan's yarn about the bolts, so natural and old-timey did the fireplace seem, until the great architect picked the plaster away with his knife and showed them the irons, and even then one doubting Thomas had to mount the scuttle stairs and peer out through the trap-door before he was convinced that modern science had lent a helping hand to recall a boyhood memory.

And the friends that this old fire had; and the way the men loved it despite the liberties they tried to take with it! And they did, at first, take liberties, and of the most exasperating kind to any well-intentioned, law-abiding, and knowledgeable wood fire. Boggs, the animal painter, whose studio lay immediately beneath MacWhirter's, was never, at first, satisfied until he had punched it black in the face; Wharton, who occupied No. 4, across the hall, would insist that each log should be stood on its head and the kindling grouped about it; while Pitkin, the sculptor, who occupied the basement because of his dirty clay and big chunks of marble, was miserable until he had jammed the back-log so tight against the besmoked chimney that not a breath of air could get between it and the blackened bricks.

But none of these well-meant but inexperienced attacks ever daunted the spirit of this fire. It would splutter a moment with ill-concealed indignation, threatening a dozen times to go out in smoke, and then all of a sudden a little bubble of laughing flame would break out under one end of a log, and then another, and away it would go roaring up the chimney in a very ecstasy of delight.

Now and then it would talk back; I have heard it many a time, when Mac and I would be sitting alone before it listening to its chatter.

"Take a seat," it would crackle; "right in front, where I can warm you. Sit, too, where you can look into my face and see how ruddy and joyous it is. I'll not bore you; I never bored anybody—never in all my life. I am an endless series of surprises, and I am never twice alike. I can sparkle with merriment, or glow with humor, or roar with laughter, dependent on your mood, or upon mine. Or I can smoulder away all by myself, crooning a low song of the woods—the song your mother loved, your cradle song—so full of content that it will soothe you into forgetfulness. When at last I creep under my gray blanket of ashes and shut my eyes, you, too, will want to sleep—you and I, old friends now with our thousand memories."

Only MacWhirter really understood its many moods—"Alexander MacWhirter, Room No. 3," the sign-board read in the hall below—and only MacWhirter could satisfy its wants; and so, after the first few months, no one dared touch it but our host, whose slightest nudge with the tongs was sufficient to kindle it into renewed activity.

It was not long after this that a certain sense of ownership permeated the coterie. They yielded the chimney and its mechanical contrivances to MacWhirter and Lonnegan, but the blaze and its generous warmth belonged to them as much as to Mac. Soon chairs were sent up from the several studios, each member of the half-circle furnishing his own—the most comfortable he owned. Then the mugs followed, and the pipe-racks, and soon Sandy MacWhirter's wood fire in No. 3 became the one spot in the building that we all loved and longed for.

And Mac was exactly fashioned for High Priest of just such a Temple of Jollity: Merry-eyed, round-faced, with one and a quarter, perhaps one and a half, of a chin tucked under his old one—a chin though that came from laughter, not from laziness; broad-shouldered, deep-chested, hearty in his voice and words, with the faintest trace—just a trace, it was so slight—of his mother-tongue in his speech; whole-souled, spontaneous, unselfish, ready to praise and never to criticise; brimming with anecdotes and adventures of forty years of experience—on the Riviera, in Sicily, Egypt, and the Far East, wherever his brush had carried him—he had all the warmth of his blazing logs in his grasp and all the snap of their coals in his eyes.

"By the Gods, but I'm glad to see you!" was his invariable greeting. "Draw up! draw up! Go get a pipe—the tobacco is in the yellow jar."

This was when Mac was alone or when no one had the floor, and the shuttlecock of general conversation was being battledored about.