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Breakfast was a farce; nobody's fire would burn and the women were wet through before they had the coffee pots out. One or two provident parties had stoves fitted up in their wagons with a joint of pipe coming out through holes in the canvas. From these, wafts of smoke issued with jaunty assurance, to be beaten down by the rain, which swept them fiercely out of the landscape.

He sat and looked at us the whole time like a turkey blind in one eye never said a word the whole time but 'pass the p-taties. I liked him though. He's a kind of sculptor, too makes patterns for all these little acorns and leaves and do-funnies on stoves. They've got forty-'leven children and need help and I'm perfectly willing Mart should help 'em. We're looking up houses now.

The steam was conveyed in iron pipes, and thus obviated the risk of fire which attended the use of stoves and open fire-grates. I remember being much pleased with seeing a neat arrangement of a "hot-closet" heated by the waste steam conveyed from the bottom of the building. This was used for holding the dinners and teas of the minor clerks and workpeople.

This rite usually culminated in a huge bonfire on the beach, in which old stoves, chairs, harnesses, bath towels, and typewriters were indiscriminately heaped. I remarked once with civilian density that this seemed a most extravagant custom. If the army did not want these things longer, why not let them fall into the hands of others who could patch them up and make use of them?

The ventilators were all closed, the stoves hot, and the air was like that of the Black Hole of Calcutta. So, after depositing my cloak and bag in an empty seat, I quietly propped both doors open with a stick of wood, shut up the stoves, and opened all the ventilators with the poker. But the celestial breeze, so grateful to me, had the most unhappy effect on the slumbering exiles.

The stoves of St. Petersburg are as enervating as the sun of Naples, and in the struggle between the Northern and Southern States of America not the least vigorous soldiers were those who came from Louisiana. In the barbarous state the action of a Northern climate as a force of natural selection must be tremendous.

Stoves had just begun to be used, and only in some houses of the gentry, "who build them not to work and feed in, as in Germany and elsewhere, but now and then to sweat in, as occasion and need shall require."

We shall have vines and myrtles and orange trees on the terrace, and I shall have a watering-pot and garden just as you do, though it must be on the bricks instead of the ground. For temperature, the stoves are said to be very effective in the winter, and in the summer we are cool and airy; the advantage of these thick-walled palazzos is coolness in summer and warmth in winter.

In hot weather, they could be kept closed except when the stove is used, and then opened only for a short time. The Franklin stoves in the large room would give the radiating warmth and cheerful blaze of an open fire, while radiating heat also from all their surfaces.

Open fires give the surest ventilation and the best cheer. If stoves are used for economy, fresh air must be systematically admitted. Furnaces are immensely useful to warm the bones of the house and as a sort of reserve force; but the heat they give is somewhat like a succession of January thaws.