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Updated: May 31, 2025
An educated man, who can use his hands, will make an anthracite coal-fire better and quicker after half a dozen trials than a raw Irish servant after a year's experience; and many a lady charges her housemaid with stupidity and obstinacy, because she fails again and again in the performance of some oft-explained task which to the mistress seems "so simple," when there is no obstinacy in the case, and only the stupidity of a poor neglected creature who had been taught nothing till she came to this country, not even to eat with decency, and, since she came, only to do the meanest chores.
Then this farther flight to England, where we expect to spend four years, and afterwards another year or two in Italy, during all which time we shall have no real home. For, as I sat in this English house, with the chill, rainy English twilight brooding over the lawn, and a coal-fire to keep me comfortable on the first evening of September, and the picture of a stranger the dead husband of Mrs.
Under a mantel of imitation black marble a merry little coal-fire beamed forth upon high and narrow "Eastlake" bookcases with long glass doors, and upon comfortable, incongruous furniture, and upon meaningless "woodwork" everywhere, and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings which Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years of possession, as "very fine things."
It was a dismal, rainy day yesterday, and we had a coal-fire in the sitting-room, beside which I sat last evening as twilight came on, and thought, rather sadly, how many times we have changed our home since we were married.
It would be a great pity, for with your mistaken ideas of comforts, with your love of coal-fire and raw beef-steak, together with your severe notions of what is proper or improper, you would soon spoil the place, and render it as stiff and gloomy as any sectarian village of the United States, with its nine banks, eighteen chapels, its one "a-b-c" school, and its immense stone jail, very considerately made large enough to contain its whole population.
The burning wreck yet lighted the heavens, and the horrid scene at the very doorstep of our home of such a happy half-year. It is fifty years ago and some months since that rainy, bloody, flame-lit October night. And now this cold, wintery, blustering midnight, I the Bob Tregellin of my story sit writing this concluding chapter. There is a coal-fire glowing hot in the grate.
I never again expect to hear a sea song sung as Tom O'Donnell sang it then, his beard still wet with the spray and his eyes glowing like coal-fire. And the voice of him! He must have been heard in half of Gloucester that night. He made the table quiver.
Nor did it quit me when, late at night, I sat in the deserted parlour, lighted only by the glimmering coal-fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many-hued description. If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such an hour, it might well be deemed a hopeless case.
The entrance-hall opens right upon the quadrangular court; and is a large, low room, with a settle of carved old oak, and other old oaken furniture, a centre-table with periodicals and newspapers on it, some family pictures on the walls, and a large, bright coal-fire in the spacious grate.
Well, it's all my own fault. If I'd stuck to the fire-eating and not drinking fire-water I'd be somewhere to-day. Just ask Bill Watson what sort of an act Ham Logan had 'Coal-fire Logan!" exclaimed the man. "That was my title. Hamilton Logan is my name, but I haven't told any one in not in a long time," he added, and he looked away. "But ask Bill Watson about me."
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