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In peace she is a distinguished author; in war she is being a mother to such of the Belgian Army as are lucky enough to pass her way. I can see her now, against a background of big soup-boilers and cooking-stoves, handing out woollen gloves and mufflers to the men who were to be on sentry duty along the line that night. It was bitterly cold, and the comforts were gratefully received.
Huge rounds of barbed wire which had been brought, and never used, were stacked by the roadside, and there were long lines of trench-furniture the enemy had had to abandon in flight, or leave in dug-outs: rough tables, chairs, rusty cooking-stoves, pots, pans, petrol tins, and broken dishes: even lamps, torn books, and a few particularly ugly blue vases for flowers.
They soon came to their senses, and for half an hour sent over to us what I should think to be, by the noise they made, tea-kettles, cooking-stoves, large cast-iron hats, etc. But our smaller and more active guns soon silenced theirs, and drove the gunners away, when we turned our attention to the boring of holes in their boats with conical pieces of iron, vulgarly called solid shot.
"It's because I knew he would manage to make cooking-stoves as unremunerative as a profession that I saved him from so glaring a failure by putting him into the law." The retort drew a grunt of amusement from Mr. Spragg; and the eyes of the two men met in unexpected understanding. "That so? What can he do, then?" the future father-in-law enquired.
Their lives are hard, their husbands are harder and stonier than the fields they half-reclaim to raise their daily bread from, their existence is labor and endurance; no grace, no beauty, no soft leisure or tender caress mitigates the life that wears itself away on wash-tubs, cheese-presses, churns, cooking-stoves, and poultry; but truth and strength and purity lie clear in these rocky basins, and love lurks like a jewel at the bottom, visible only when some divine sun-ray lights it up, love as true and deep and healthy as it is silent and unknown.
Each family has a narrow sitting-room, which is used also for working and eating, and a closet called a bed room. But few of the rooms are properly ventilated. The sun never shines in at the windows, and if the sky is overcast the rooms are so dark as to need artificial light. The whole house is dirty, and is filled with the mingled odors from the cooking-stoves and the sinks.
Rosa Bonheur, with her wanderings among mountains and pastures, alternating with the vigorous work of the studio, needed no other appliances for health. The same advantages come to many, in spite of delinquent mothers, in the bracing habits of household labor, at least where mechanical improvements have not rendered it too easy. Improved cooking-stoves and Mrs.
All sorts of mechanics' tools are clumsy and inconvenient: the turner's lathe moves by broken impulses; door-hinges are made to order, and lift the door from the ground as it opens upon them; all nails and tacks we hand-made; window-sashes are contrived to be glazed without putty, and the panes are put in from the top, so that to repair a broken glass the whole sash is taken apart; cooking-stoves are unknown to the native cooks, who work at an open fire, with crane and dangling pot-hooks; furniture is put together with wooden pegs instead of screws; you do not buy a door-lock at a hardware store, you get a fabbro to make it, and he comes with a leathern satchel full of tools to fit and finish it on the door.
Cooking-stoves were coming into fashion, but they were clumsy affairs, and our elders thought that no cooking could be quite so nice as that which was done by an open fire. We younger ones reveled in the warm, beautiful glow, that we look back to as to a remembered sunset. There is no such home-splendor now.
It found its way now everywhere, where there was only a hole for it to slip into, a kettle or a pan for it to be boiled or fried in into all the galleys in the harbour, from the large, superior steamship or full-rigged vessel, down to the cooking-stoves on the timber sloops and the little decked barges, where people were resting, and broiling it in the summer evening, into all the back blocks and small streets from the cellars to the garrets.
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