“Mother says I may put little cheesecloth curtains in them.”
“Curtains will look sweet the day after you take in the winter supply of coal,” grinned Roger, who appeared with the other boys, carrying Christopher’s bit of log.
“They won’t look dirty, if that’s what you mean by ‘sweet,’” Dorothy retorted. “Look—” and she opened the door of a coal bin—“the coal is put in through a concrete chute that leads directly into the bin and the bin is entirely shut off from the cellar. No dust floats out of that, young man.”
“How do you get the coal out?”
“Here’s a little door that slides up and catches. You notice that the floor of the bin isn’t level with the cellar floor; it’s raised to make it a comfortable height for shoveling. Under it is the place for the logs for the open fires. There are two bins, one for furnace coal and the other for the coal for the stoves, and the kindling wood goes in this third one. They are all together and large enough but not too large, and the furnace coal is near the boiler and the small coal is near the laundry and the wood is close to the dumb waiter that will take that and the clean clothes upstairs.”
“All as compact as a cut-out puzzle,” approved Roger. “I take off my hat to this arrangement.”
“Thank you,” courtesied Dorothy. “Mother and I worked that out together, and we’re rather pleased with it ourselves.”
“What do you do with the ashes?” asked Roger, who took care of several furnaces in the winter time, and therefore made his examination as a specialist.
“Put them down that chute with a swinging door and into a covered can. It will be hard for the ashes to fly there.”
“This is the concrete floor we superintended,” said Helen, looking at it closely.