It is a January night.

". . . . . . . Enclosed From Chaos and the inroad of Darkness old,"

we sit with our book before the fire. Outside in the night ghostly shapes pa.s.s by, ghostly faces press against the window, and at the corners of the house ghostly voices pause for parley, muttering thickly through the swirl and smother of the snow. Inside burns the fire, kindling into glorious pink and white peonies on the nearest wall and glowing warm and sweet on her face as she reads. The children are in bed. She is reading aloud to me:

"'I wish the good old times would come again,' she said, 'when we were not quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor, but there was a middle state'--so she was pleased to ramble on--'in which, I am sure, we were a great deal happier.'"

Her eyes left the familiar page, wandering far away beyond the fire.

"Is it so hard to bear up under two thousand five hundred a year?" I asked.

The gleam of the fire, or perhaps a fancy out of the far-beyond, lighted her eyes as she answered,

"We began on four hundred and fifty a year; and we were perfectly--"

"Yes, but you forget the parsonage; that was rent free!"

"Four hundred and fifty with rent free--and we had everything we could--"

"You forget again that we had n't even one of our four boys."

Her gaze rested tenderly upon the little chairs between her and the fire, just where the boys had left them at the end of their listening an hour before.

"If you had allowed me," she went on, "I was going to say how glad we ought to be that we are not quite so rich as--"

"We should like to be?" I questioned.

"'A purchase'"--she was reading again--"'is but a purchase, now that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a triumph.

Do you not remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher which you dragged home late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Sat.u.r.day night, when you set off from Islington, fearing--'

"Is n't this exactly our case?" she asked, interrupting herself for no other purpose than to prolong the pa.s.sage she was reading.

"Truly," I replied, trying hard to hide a note of eagerness in my voice, for I had kept my battery masked these many months, "only Lamb wanted an old folio, whereas we need a new car. I have driven that old machine for five years and it was second-hand to begin with."

I watched for the effect of the shot, but evidently I had not got the range, for she was saying.

"Is there a sweeter bit in all of 'Elia' than this, do you think"?

"'--And when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures--and when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as c.u.mbersome--'"

She had paused again. To know when to pause! how to make the most of your author! to draw out the linked sweetness of a pa.s.sage to its longest--there reads your loving reader!

"You see," laying her hand on mine, "old books and old friends are best, and I should think you had really rather have a nice safe old car than any new one. Thieves don't take old cars, as you know. And you can't insure them, that's a comfort! And cars don't skid and collide just because they are _old_, do they? And you never have to scold the children about the paint and--and the old thing _does_ go--what do you think Lamb would say about old cars?"

"Lamb be hanged on old cars!" and I sent the sparks flying with a fresh stick.

"Well, then let's hear the rest of him on 'Old _China_.'" And so she read, while the fire burned, and outside swept the winter storm.

I have a weakness for out-loud reading and Lamb, and a peculiar joy in wood fires when the nights are dark and snowy. My mind is not, after all, _much_ set on automobiles then; there is such a difference between a wild January night on Mullein Hill and an automobile show--or any other show. If St. Bernard of Cluny had been an American and not a monk, I think Jerusalem the Golden might very likely have been a quiet little town like Hingham, all black with a winter night and lighted for the Saint with a single open fire. Anyhow I cannot imagine the mansions of the Celestial City without fireplaces. I don't know how the equatorial people do; I have never lived on the equator, and I have no desire to--nor in any other place where it is too hot for a fireplace, or where wood is so scarce that one is obliged to subst.i.tute a gas-log. I wish I could build an open hearth into every lowly home and give every man who loves out-loud reading a copy of Lamb and sticks enough for a fire. I wish--is it futile to wish that besides the fireplace and the sticks I might add a great many more winter evenings to the round of the year? I would leave the days as they are in their beautiful and endless variety, but the long, shut-in winter evenings

"When young and old in circle About the firebrands close--"

these I would multiply, taking them away from June to give to January, could I supply the fire and the boys and the books and the reader to go with them.

And I often wonder if more men might not supply these things for themselves? There are January nights for all, and s.p.a.ce enough outside of city and suburb for simple firesides; books enough also; yes, and readers-aloud if they are given the chance. But the boys are hard to get. They might even come girls. Well, what is the difference, anyway? Suppose mine had been dear things with ribbons in their hair--not these four, but four more? Then all the glowing circle about the fireplace had been filled, the chain complete, a link of fine gold for every link of steel! Ah! the cat hath nine lives, as Phisologus saith; but a man hath as many lives as he hath sons, with two lives besides for every daughter. So it must always seem to me when I remember the precious thing that vanished from me before I could even lay her in her mother's arms. She would have been, I think, a full head taller than the oldest boy, and wiser than all four of the boys, being a girl.

The real needs of life are few, and to be had by most men, even though they include children and an automobile. Second-hand cars are very cheap, and the world seems full of orphans--how many orphans now! It is n't a question of getting the things; the question is, What are the necessary things?

First, I say, a fireplace. A man does well to build his fireplace first instead of the garage. Better than a roof over one's head is a fire at one's feet; for what is there deadlier than the chill of a fireless house? The fireplace first, unless indeed he have the chance, as I had when a boy, to get him a pair of tongs.

The first piece of household furniture I ever purchased was a pair of old tongs. I was a lad in my teens. "Five--five--five--five--v-v-v-ve _will_ you make it ten?" I heard the auctioneer cry as I pa.s.sed the front gate. He held a pair of bra.s.s-headed hearth tongs above his head, waving them wildly at the unresponsive bidders.

"Will _you_ make it ten?" he yelled at me as the last comer.

"Ten," I answered, a need for fire tongs, that blistering July day, suddenly overcoming me.

"And sold for ten cents to the boy in the gate," shouted the auctioneer. "Will somebody throw in the fireplace to go with them!"

I took my tongs rather sheepishly, I fear, rather helplessly, and got back through the gate, for I was on foot and several miles from home.

I trudged on for home carrying those tongs with me all the way, not knowing why, not wishing to throw them into the briers for they were very old and full of story, and I--was very young and full of--I cannot tell, remembering what little _boys_ are made of. And now here they lean against the hearth, that very pair. I packed them in the bottom of my trunk when I started for college; I saved them through the years when our open fire was a "base-burner," and then a gas-radiator in a city flat. Moved, preserved, "married" these many years, they stand at last where the boy must have dreamed them standing--that hot July day, how long, long ago!

But why should a boy have dreamed such dreams? And what was it in a married old pair of bra.s.s-headed hearth tongs that a boy in his teens should have bought them at auction and then have carried them to college with him, rattling about on the bottom of his trunk? For it was not an over-packed trunk. There were the tongs on the bottom and a thirty-cent edition of "The Natural History of Selborne" on the top--that is all. That is all the boy remembers. These two things, at least, are all that now remain out of the trunkful he started with from home--the tongs for sentiment, and for friendship the book.

"Are you listening?" she asks, looking up to see if I have gone to sleep.

"Yes, I 'm listening."

"And dreaming?"

"Yes, dreaming a little, too,--of you, dear, and the tongs there, and the boys upstairs, and the storm outside, and the fire, and of this sweet room,--an old, old dream that I had years and years ago,--all come true, and more than true."

She slipped her hand into mine.

"Shall I go on?"

"Yes, go on, please, and I will listen--and, if you don't mind, dream a little, too, perhaps."

There is something in the fire and the rise and fall of her voice, something so infinitely soothing in its tones, and in Lamb, and in such a night as this--so vast and fearful, but so futile in its bitter sweep about the fire--that while one listens one must really dream too.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The ice crop]

III

THE ICE CROP