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"Yes, I shall like to hear the legend, if it is a genuine one that has been adopted into the popular belief, and came down in chimney-corners with the smoke and soot that gathers there; and incrusted over with humanity, by passing from one homely mind to another.
His hair will not bristle, therefore, at the stories which in times when chimney-corners had benches in them, where old people sat poking into the ashes of the past, and raking out traditions like live coals used to be told about this very room of his ancestral house. In fact, these tales are too absurd to bristle even childhood's hair.
The fading grey light fell dimly on the walls decorated with guns, whips, and foxes' brushes, on coats and hats flung on the chairs, on tankards sending forth a scent of flat ale, and on a half-choked fire, with pipes propped up in the chimney-corners: signs of a domestic life destitute of any hallowing charm, with which the look of gloomy vexation on Godfrey's blond face was in sad accordance.
Excepting the warming-pan and the two arm-chairs ordinarily in the chimney-corners, there was no provision in the room for bodily ease or comfort: a lack unperceived by its occupants, but which an American house-wife missing her many small luxuries and conveniences would have found sharply marked.
Father, too, suddenly discovered that there was a lull in business, and that cheerful chimney-corners were more attractive than ledgers. Ralph and the girls brought their young friends there. What was strangest of all, the nervous headaches almost entirely disappeared; even the high notes of a song, or the jingling of piano-keys, failed to bring them back.
He failed her, her one sole hope in life; and without being aware of it, her voice forsook the songs of suffering and sorrow for old Covenanting hymns, hymns with which her mother had lulled her, which the class-leader pitched in the chimney-corners, grand and sweet Methodist hymns, brimming with melody and with all fantastic involutions of tune to suit that ecstatic worship, hymns full of the beauty of holiness, steadfast, relying, sanctified by the salvation they had lent to those in worse extremity than hers, for they had found themselves in the grasp of hell, while she was but in the jaws of death.
To anybody fresh from London it would have seemed primitive indeed, with its broad hearth and massive iron dogs, its enormous fire built with logs and the roots of trees, and its cosy chimney-corners, where the sitters' heads were from time to time enveloped with wreathing smoke; but I had grown so accustomed to such sights that this hostelry seemed to contain all the blessings and commodities of an advanced state of civilization.
But these, no doubt, were foolish stories, conceived andpropagated in chimney-corners, while yet there were chimney-corners and firesides, and smoky flues. There wasno truth in such things, I am sure; the Black Man had changedhis tactics, and knew better than to lure the human soul thus to come to him with his musty autograph-book.
But these tender schemes were not feasible among the scattered inhabitants of Egdon Heath. In name they were parishioners, but virtually they belonged to no parish at all. People who came to these few isolated houses to keep Christmas with their friends remained in their friends' chimney-corners drinking mead and other comforting liquors till they left again for good and all.
Many and strange were the fables which the gossips whispered about her in all the chimney-corners of the town. Among the time-worn articles of furniture that had been left in the mansion, there was a tall antique mirror which was well worthy of a tale by itself, and perhaps may hereafter be the theme of one.
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