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Updated: June 5, 2025
There was Bandy-legs, for instance, who, much to his own inconvenience, had shown Trapper Jim and the rest just how easy it would be for some animal to drop down the wide-throated chimney during the absence of the cabin's owner and play havoc within. The panic excited by the squatter skunk had been another lesson.
The fire-places, worthy of the wide-throated central chimney, were bordered by pictured tiles, some of them with Scripture stories, some with Watteau-like figures, tall damsels in slim waists and with spread enough of skirt for a modern ballroom, with bowing, reclining, or musical swains of what everybody calls the "conventional" sort, that is, the swain adapted to genteel society rather than to a literal sheep-compelling existence.
It began, if one were quick to observe, with a wrinkling about the corners of the sharp blue eyes, then became audible in a succession of small explosions that seemed to have their origin in the region of the esophagus and to threaten the larynx with disruption, until relief was found in a wide-throated peal that subsided in a second series of small explosions and gradually rumbled off into silence somewhere in the region of the diaphragm, leaving only the wrinkles about the corners of the blue eyes as a kind of warning that the whole process might be repeated upon sufficient provocation.
So in the dim waning of the day before Christmas three bishops met in Valdosta and saw its mills and storehouses, its wide-throated and sandy streets, in the mellow glow of a crimson sun. The governor glared anxiously up the street as he helped the bishop of New York into his car and welcomed him graciously. "I am troubled," said the governor, "about the niggers. They are acting queerly.
For it was the heart of the house, right here, so close at hand that even a stranger could catch a glimpse of it by chance. A great, wide-throated fireplace held a splendid fire of burning logs, the light from it illumining the whole room, otherwise dark in the October twilight. Before it on the hearth-rug were silhouetted, in distinct lines against its rich background, two figures.
But this was before the multimillionaire had made the need for an augmentative of the word "luxury"; and Jim's house was noteworthy for its beauty: its cunningly wrought iron and wood; and columned halls and stairways; and wide-throated fireplaces, each a picture in tile, wood, and metalwork; and vistas like little fairylands through silken portières; and carven chairs and couches, reminiscent of royal palaces; and chambers where lovely color-schemes were worked out in rug, and bed, and canopy.
Her lips opened, but no sound came from them. The very breath in her body seemed dying out with each faint gasp that broke over the white, mute lips. Outside the night winds grew wilder and fiercer. A gust of hail battered against the window panes and rattled down the wide-throated chimneys. Then suddenly; all was still again!
Stately ball-rooms, where beauty once reigned, are cold and empty and mildewed, and halls, where laughter rang, are silent. Time was when every wide-throated chimney poured forth its cloud of smoke, when every andiron held a generous log, andirons which are now gone to decorate Mr. Centennial's home in New York or lie with a tag in the window of some curio shop.
At the evening meal there was less of form and circumstance; and when the winter night closed in, when the flame crackled and the sparks streamed up the wide-throated chimney, and the founders of New France with their tawny allies were gathered around the blaze, then did the Grand Master resign the collar and the staff to the successor of his honors, and, with jovial courtesy, pledge him in a cup of wine.
Ben took the body in his arms, and carried it to the boat-house; but with all his earnestness and strength, he had no power to give back life, where it had been so rudely quenched. Pure or not, the blood in those veins was frozen to ice, and though Ben heaped up wood on his hearth till the flames roared up the wide-throated chimney, there was not heat enough to thaw a single drop.
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