.

Some people maintain a fire from January to December; and, indeed, the
days on which a ruddy grate offends are very few. According to
Mortimer Collins, out of the three hundred and sixty-five days that
make up the year only on the odd five is a fire quite dispensable. A
perennial fire is, perhaps, luxury writ large. The very fact that
sunbeams falling on the coals dispirit them to greyness and
ineffectual pallor seems to prove that when the sun rides high it is
time to have done with fuel except in the kitchen or in the open air.

The fire in the open air is indeed joy perpetual, and there is no
surer way of renewing one's youth than by kindling and tending it,
whether it be a rubbish fire for potatoes, or an aromatic offering of
pine spindles and fir cones, or the scientific structure of the gipsy
to heat a tripod-swung kettle. The gipsy's fire is a work of art. "Two
short sticks were stuck in the ground, and a third across to them like
a triangle. Against this frame a number of the smallest and driest
stick were leaned, so that they made a tiny hut. Outside these there
was a second layer of longer sticks, all standing, or rather leaning,
against the first. If a stick is placed across, lying horizontally,
supposing it catches fire, it just burns through the middle and that
is all, the ends go out. If it is stood nearly upright, the flame
draws up to it; it is certain to catch, burns longer, and leaves a
good ember." So wrote one who knew--Richard Jefferies, in _Bevis_,
that epic of boyhood. Having built the fire, the next thing is to
light it. An old gipsy woman can light a fire in a gale, just as a
sailor can always light his pipe, even in the cave of Aeolus; but the
amateur is less dexterous. The smoke of the open-air fire is charged
with memory. One whiff of it, and for a swift moment we are in
sympathy with our remotest ancestors, and all that is elemental and
primitive in us is awakened.

An American poet, R. H. Messinger, wrote--

"Old wood to burn!--
Ay, bring the hillside beech
From where the owlets meet and screech,
And ravens croak;
The crackling pine, the cedar sweet;
Bring, too, a clump of fragrant peat,
Dug 'neath the fern;
The knotted oak,
A faggot, too, perhaps,
Whose bright flame, dancing, winking,
Shall light us at our drinking;
While the oozing sap
Shall make sweet music to our thinking."

There is no fire of co