reveled in the warm, beautiful glow, that we look back to as to a
remembered sunset. There is no such home-splendor now.

When supper was finished, and the tea-kettle was pushed back on
the crane, and the backlog 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