uccessful as that man! While I am reading
my book by the fire, and taking an active part in important transactions
that may be a good deal better than real, let me be thankful that
a great many men are profitably employed in offices and bureaus and
country stores in keeping up the gossip and endless exchange of opinions
among mankind, so much of which is made to appear to the women at home
as "business." I find that there is a sort of busy idleness among men
in this world that is not held in disrepute. When the time comes that
I have to prove my right to vote, with women, I trust that it will be
remembered in my favor that I made this admission. If it is true, as a
witty conservative once said to me, that we never shall have peace in
this country until we elect a colored woman president, I desire to be
rectus in curia early.

IV

The fireplace, as we said, is a window through which we look out upon
other scenes. We like to read of the small, bare room, with cobwebbed
ceiling and narrow window, in which the poor child of genius sits with
his magical pen, the master of a realm of beauty and enchantment.
I think the open fire does not kindle the imagination so much as it
awakens the memory; one sees the past in its crumbling embers and ashy
grayness, rather than the future. People become reminiscent and even
sentimental in front of it. They used to become something else in those
good old days when it was thought best to heat the poker red hot before
plunging it into the mugs of flip. This heating of the poker has been
disapproved of late years, but I do not know on what grounds; if one
is to drink bitters and gins and the like, such as I understand as good
people as clergymen and women take in private, and by advice, I do not
know why one should not make them palatable and heat them with his own
poker. Cold whiskey out of a bottle, taken as a prescription six times
a day on the sly, is n't my idea of virtue any more than the social
ancestral glass, sizzling wickedly with the hot iron. Names are so
confusing in this world; but things are apt to remain pretty much the
same, whatever we call them.

Perhaps as you look into the fireplace it widens and grows deep and
cavernous. The back and the jambs are built up of great stones, not
always smoothly laid, with jutting ledges upon which ashes are apt to
lie. The hearthstone is an enormous block of trap rock, with a surface
not perfectly even, but a capital place to crac