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Updated: June 27, 2025
THE MISTRESS. More likely it is a sort of tradition; I don't believe that the world has a feeling of personal regard for any author who was not loved by those who knew him most intimately. THE FIRE-TENDER. Which comes to the same thing. The qualities, the spirit, that got him the love of his acquaintances he put into his books. MANDEVILLE. That does n't seem to me sufficient.
HERBERT. Did you ever get into a diligence with a growling English- man who had n't secured the place he wanted? THE MISTRESS. Did you ever see an English exquisite at the San Carlo, and hear him cry "Bwavo"? MANDEVILLE. At any rate, he acted out his nature, and was n't afraid to. THE FIRE-TENDER. I think Mandeville is right, for once.
The Fire-Tender sat in his winter-garden in the third month; there was a fire on the hearth burning before him. He cut the leaves of "Scribner's Monthly" with his penknife, and thought of Jehoiakim. That seems as real as the other.
OUR NEXT DOOR. Probably he's consul somewhere. They mostly are. THE FIRE-TENDER. After all, it's the easiest thing in the world to sit and sneer at eccentricities. But what a dead and uninteresting world it would be if we were all proper, and kept within the lines! Affairs would soon be reduced to mere machinery.
MANDEVILLE. Speaking about culture and manners, did you ever notice how extremes meet, and that the savage bears himself very much like the sort of cultured persons we were talking of last night? THE FIRE-TENDER. In what respect? MANDEVILLE. Well, you take the North American Indian. He is never interested in anything, never surprised at anything.
THE FIRE-TENDER. How is it about the war-path and all that? MANDEVILLE. Oh, these studiously calm and cultured people may have malice underneath. It takes them to give the most effective "little digs;" they know how to stick in the pine-splinters and set fire to them. HERBERT. But there is more in Mandeville's idea.
THE FIRE-TENDER. It seems to me that the real reason why reformers and some philanthropists are unpopular is, that they disturb our serenity and make us conscious of our own shortcomings. It is only now and then that a whole people get a spasm of reformatory fervor, of investigation and regeneration. At other times they rather hate those who disturb their quiet.
And this is the reason that we cannot with any certainty tell what any person will do or amount to, for, while we know his talents and abilities, we do not know the resulting whole, which is he himself. THE FIRE-TENDER. So if you could take all the first-class qualities that we admire in men and women, and put them together into one being, you wouldn't be sure of the result?
THE YOUNG LADY. What vexes me most is, that women, married women, have so easily consented to give up open fires in their houses. HERBERT. They dislike the dust and the bother. I think that women rather like the confined furnace heat. THE FIRE-TENDER. Nonsense; it is their angelic virtue of submission. We wouldn't be hired to stay all-day in the houses we build.
Had he not for years been a fire-tender down in the Rhineland? He was the only man in the village who, after serving his time in the army, had not returned home to till the soil in the sweat of his brow, but had remained down there, where the world puts forth its temptation and the saints are only to be found in the cathedrals, not to be met upon the highways.
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