I HAVE read and heard much praise of open fires, but I recall no praise of bringing in the wood. There is, to be sure, the good old song:—

Come bring with a noise,
My merrie, merrie boys,
The Christmas log to the firing;
While my good dame, she
Bids ye all make free,
And drink to your heart's desiring.

But this refers to a particular log, the Yule log (or clog, as they used to call it) which was brought in only once a year, and, even so, the singer evidently is not bringing it in himself. He is looking on. The merrie, merrie boys, he thinks, need encouragement. After they have got the log in, and the good dame has produced the rewarding jug, bowl, or bottle, everybody will feel better. Dry without and wet within; how oft, indeed, has praise of open fire kept company with praise of open bottle! Forests uncounted have been cut down,—the hillside beech, from where the owlets meet and screech; the crackling pine, the cedar sweet, the knotted oak, with fragrant peat,—and burned up, stick by stick; so that, as the poet explains, the bright flames, dancing, winking, shall light us at our drinking.

Others than inebriates have sung the praise of open fires; but the most highly respectable, emulating the bright flames, have usually winked at drinking. But never one of them, so far as I remember, has praised the honest, wholesome, temperate exercise of bringing in the wood.

And there is the Song That Has Never Been Sung—nor ever will be, so the tune is immaterial:--

How jolly it is, of a cold winter morning,
To pop out of bed just a bit before dawning,
And, thinking the while of your jolly cold bath,
To kindle a flame on your jolly cold hearth!
Ah me, it is merry!
Sing derry-down-derry!
Where now is the lark? I am up before him.
I chuckle with glee at this quaint little whim.
I make up the fire—pray Heaven it catches!
But what in the world have they done with the matches?
Ah me, it is merry!
Sing derry-down-derry!

And so forth, and so forth.

I invented that song myself, in January, 1918, when circumstances led me—so to speak, by the nape of the neck—to heat my home with wood because nowhere could I buy coal. But I felt no inpulse to sing it—simply a deeper, kindlier sympathy for forefather in the good old days before stoves and furnaces. I do not blame him for not taking a cold bath. I wish in vain that he had had the thing that I call a match. An archæological authority tells me how forefather managed without it:—

'Holding between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand a piece of imported gun-flint (long quarried at Brandon in Suffolk, England), strike it diagonally against a circlet of properly tempered steel held in the left hand, so that the spark flies downward on a dry, scorched linen rag lying in a tin cup (the tinder-box). When the spark instantly catches the rag, blow or touch it into flame against the sulphur-tipped end of a match, which will not otherwise ignite. Then with the burning match, light a candle socketed in the lid of the tinder-box, and smother the smouldering rag with an inner tin lid dropped upon it. Thus you were master of the house of a winter's morning when the fires were out.'

But I wouldn't believe that archæological authority if he had added, 'singing at your task.' Singeing at it seems more plausible.