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The little man rose and straddled on the hearth-rug, with his back to the fire and his hands under his coat-tails. "Now, sir," he said, glaring at the young man like a school-master "what the deuce are you talking about? Out with it: no evasion." "Oh, hang it, Professor, don't jump down my throat, spurs and all," said Random, rather annoyed by this dictatorial tone.
The portrait has always seemed alive to me. I used to talk to it sometimes when I was a little thing, and I nevah could beah to look at it when I had been naughty. I wish you would tell me about her." She knelt on the hearth-rug as she spoke, and held the long toasting-fork toward the fire.
The hardest thing in this world to get used to is the absence of a familiar footstep and the cheerful greeting of a familiar eye. And the man with no chick or child feels even the absence of his dog from the hearth-rug when he returns from a journey or his day's work. It gives him a sense of strangeness and loss.
Whether it be the school of poetry which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint of a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same.
"I think I'm better to-night, Clarkson," he said. "Your lordship seems very well indeed, my lord," murmured that diplomat on the hearth-rug. "How old do you think I am, Clarkson?" Clarkson knew perfectly well, but it was better to make a deprecatory confused noise. "Ah! well, we needn't reckon by years ... I feel young enough," observed the stately figure before the fire.
The common-sensible man placed the snow-child on the hearth-rug, right in front of the hissing and fuming stove. "Now she will be comfortable!" cried Mr. Lindsey, rubbing his hands and looking about him, with the pleasantest smile you ever saw. "Make yourself at home, my child."
In an age when everything seems pretty well discovered, when one cannot preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life, when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an insoluble, mystery is standing on one's very hearth-rug.
Lone Sahib caught it by the scruff of its neck, handed it over to the sweeper to be drowned, and fined the bearer four annas. That evening, as he was reading in his room, he fancied that he saw something moving about on the hearth-rug, outside the circle of light from his reading-lamp.
The fox-terrier sits blinking on the hearth-rug in the pretty drawing-room as nightfall approaches, and a servant appears with a message that a woman has come with a big cake from Mrs. O'Blank, a sympathising neighbour.
In the centre there is a piece of carpet on which the table stands, but the rest of the room is bare of carpeting, except the hearth-rug. The low window has a seat let into the wall under it. The furniture of the apartment is utilitarian in the strictest sense. There is nothing there for ornament or luxury, or even for ease; only what is absolutely necessary.
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