seldom requested in private
circles--he and Tabitha used to sit down sociably by the kitchen
hearth. This was always heaped plentifully with the rubbish of his
day's labor. As the foundation of the fire there would be a
goodly-sized back-log of red oak, which after being sheltered from
rain or damp above a century still hissed with the heat and distilled
streams of water from each end, as if the tree had been cut down
within a week or two. Next there were large sticks, sound, black and
heavy, which had lost the principle of decay and were indestructible
except by fire, wherein they glowed like red-hot bars of iron. On this
solid basis Tabitha would rear a lighter structure, composed of the
splinters of door-panels, ornamented mouldings, and such quick
combustibles, which caught like straw and threw a brilliant blaze high
up the spacious flue, making its sooty sides visible almost to the
chimney-top. Meantime, the gloom of the old kitchen would be chased
out of the cobwebbed corners and away from the dusky cross-beams
overhead, and driven nobody could tell whither, while Peter smiled
like a gladsome man and Tabitha seemed a picture of comfortable age.
All this, of course, was but an emblem of the bright fortune which the
destruction of the house would shed upon its occupants.

While the dry pine was flaming and crackling like an irregular
discharge of fairy-musketry, Peter sat looking and listening in a
pleasant state of excitement; but when the brief blaze and uproar were
succeeded by the dark-red glow, the substantial heat and the deep
singing sound which were to last throughout the evening, his humor
became talkative. One night--the hundredth time--he teased Tabitha to
tell him something new about his great-granduncle.

"You have been sitting in that chimney-corner fifty-five years, old
Tabby, and must have heard many a tradition about him," said Peter.
"Did not you tell me that when you first came to the house there was
an old woman sitting where you sit now who had been housekeeper to the
famous Peter Goldthwaite?"

"So there was, Mr. Peter," answered Tabitha, "and she was near about a
hundred years old. She used to say that she and old Peter Goldthwaite
had often spent a sociable evening by the kitchen fire--pretty much as
you and I are doing now, Mr. Peter."

"The old fellow must have resembled me in more points than one," said
Peter, complacently, "or he never would have grown so rich. But
methinks he might