smoke.

It rose through the kindlings; it piled out through the little door; it hung like great cobwebs to the roof of the cellar. With great presence of mind I hastily closed the little door and ran lightly up the cellar-stairs. The smoke had preceded me; it got there first through the registers; and more was coming.

I met a woman.

'Is the house afire?' she asked excitedly.

I calmed her. 'It is not,' I replied quietly, in a matter-of-course way. 'When you start a fire for the winter it always smokes a little.'

We opened the windows. We went outside and looked at the house. It leaked smoke through every crevice except, curiously enough, the chimney. Ah-h-h-h-h! I saw what had happened. I groped my way to the cellar and opened the back damper. Now the smoke went gladly up the chimney, and the view through the little door was at once beautiful and awful: it was like looking into the heart of an angry volcano. Evidently it was time to lay the eggs on the nest.

I shoveled the abyss full of coal, and the volcano became extinct. Presently, instead of a furnace full of fire, I had a furnace full of egg coal. I began taking it out, egg by egg, at first with my fingers and then with the tongs from the dining-room fireplace. And when the woman idly questioned me as to what I was going to do down cellar with the tongs, I bit my lips.

To the man who runs it (an absurd term as applied to a thing that has no legs and weighs several tons) the furnace is his first thought in the morning and his last thought at night. His calendar has but two seasons—winter, when the furnace is going, and summer, when the furnace is out. But in summer his thoughts are naturally more philosophical. He sees how profoundly this recent invention (which he is not at the time running) has changed man's attitude toward nature.

I am, of course, not referring to those furnaces which are endowed with more than the average human intelligence; those superfurnaces which are met with in the advertisements, which shake themselves down, shovel their own coal, carry and sift their own ashes, regulate their own draughts, and, if they do not actually order and pay for their own coal, at least consume it as carefully as if they did.

With a furnace like mine a man experiences all the emotions of which he is capable. He loves, he hates, he admires, he despises, he grieves, he exults. There have been times when I have felt like patting my furnace; and again, times when I have slammed his little door and spoken words to him far, far hotter than the fire that smouldered and refused to burn in his bowels. I judge from what I have read that taming a wild animal must be a good deal like taming a furnace, with one important exception: the wild-animal-tamer never loses his temper or the beast would kill him; but a furnace, fortunately for suburban mortality, cannot kill its tamer.

When his furnace happens to be good-natured, however, a man will often find the bedtime hour with it pleasant and even enjoyable. He descends, humming or whistling, to the cellar; and the subsequent shaking and shoveling is, after all, no more than a healthy exercise which he would not otherwise take and which will make him sleep better. He is friendly with this rotund, coal-eating giant; he regards it almost like a big baby which he is putting to bed—or, at least, he might so regard it if putting a baby to bed was one of his recognized pleasures.

But, oh, what a difference in the morning! He awakes in the dark, startled perhaps from some pleasant dream by the wild alarm-m-m-m of a clock under his pillow; and outside the snug island of warmth on which he lies, the Universe stretches away in every direction, above, below, and on every side of him, cold, dreary, and unfit for human habitation, to and beyond the remotest star. In that cold Universe how small he is!—how warm and how weak! Instantly he thinks of the furnace, and the remotest star seems near by comparison. The thought of getting up and going down cellar seems as unreal as the thought of getting up and going to meet the sun at that pale streak which, through his easterly window, heralds the reluctant coming of another day. Yet he knows that he must, and that eventually he will, get up. In vain he tells himself how splendid, how invigorating will be the plunge from his warm bed right into the fresh, brisk, hygienic morning air.

The fresh, brisk, hygienic morning air does not appeal to him. Unwillingly he recalls a line in the superfurnace advertisement,—'Get up warm and cosy,'—and helplessly wishes that he had such a furnace. 'Like Andrew Carnegie!' he adds bitterly. At that moment he would anarchistically assassinate Andrew, provided he could do it without getting up. Nevertheless—he gets up! He puts on—'Curse it, where is that sleeve?'—the bath-robe and slippers that have been all night cooling for him, and starts on his lonely journey through the tomblike silence. Now, if ever, is the time to hum, but there is not a hum in him: down, down, down he goes to the cellar and peeks with dull hope through the familiar little door. 'Good morning, Fire.' He shakes, he shovels, he opens drafts and manipulates dampers. And the Furnace, impassive, like a Buddha holding up the house with as many arms as an octopus, seems to be watching him with a grave yet idle interest. Which is all the more horrible because it has no face.

NO STAIRS!—NO ATTIC

ATTICS are done for! Listen to the words of the man who has built, and written about, what he calls a Servantless Cottage:—

'Climbing stairs is ofttimes too strenuous for the happy housewife, so there must be no stairs.'

Shades of our grandmothers! If we can believe this enthusiastic designer and builder, only a few more decades at most will miserable women, unhappy housewives, and, by inference, undesirable mothers, continue to drag up and down stairs their pitiful existences in houses of more than one story.

And observe also, not only the vanishing of stairs and attics, but the disappearance of the servant-problem. 'For in this Servantless Cottage,' says the satisfied man, 'milady need fear no drudgery. A very few hours will suffice for housekeeping and cookery. Work becomes a pleasure and a maid undesirable.'

Well, well! There have been a good many proposed solutions of the domestic service question—but to solve it by giving it up seems no very crowning triumph of domestic mathematics. The experience of innumerable young married couples with kitchenettes goes to show that life can be conducted under that solution, especially when the couples are young and but recently married. Then, indeed, they need neither an attic in the top of the house nor a general—that brave girl capable of turning a quick efficient hand to everything from dusting to doughnuts—all over it. But why not, for that matter, admit that 'climbing is ofttimes too strenuous for a happy general.' She, too is human—has legs—gets tired—

This designer of servantless cottages was, I imagine, an atticless child: he climbed no stairs to that room of pleasing mystery, rich in dusty and discarded things that had once been living and important in the life of his family, where the sunbeams streamed like a ladder down through the skylight, or, on