“Trust Roger for not letting anything pass him,” smiled Ethel Brown.

“That’s why I’m such a cyclopedia of accurate information, ma’am,” Roger retorted.  “She said it was a stove.”

“With cotton wool for fuel?” laughed Ethel Blue.

“It seems they use natural gas here for heating as well as cooking, and the woolly stuff was asbestos.  The gas is turned on at the foot of the back wall and the asbestos becomes heated and gives off warmth but doesn’t burn.”

“I stayed in Pittsburg once in a boarding house where the rooms were heated with natural gas,” said Mr. Emerson.  “It made a sufficient heat, but you had to be careful not to turn the burner low just before all the methodical Pittsburgers cooked dinner, for if you made it too low the flame might go out when the pressure was light.”

“Did the opposite happen at night?”

“It did.  In the short time I was there the newspapers noted several cases of fires caused by people leaving their stoves turned up high at night and the flames bursting into the room and setting fire to some inflammable thing near at hand when the pressure grew strong after the good Pittsburgers went to bed.”

“It certainly is useful,” commended Mrs. Morton.  “A turn of the key and that’s all.”

“No coal to be shovelled—­think of it!” exclaimed Roger, who took care of several furnaces in winter.  “No ashes to be sifted and carried away!  The thought causes me to burst into song,” and he chanted ridicuously:—­

    “Given a tight tin stove, asbestos fluff,
    A match of wood, an iron key, and, puff,
      Thou, Natural Gas, wilt warm the Arctic wastes,
    And Arctic wastes are Paradise enough.”

As the train drew out of the city the young people’s expectations of fairyland were not fulfilled.

“I don’t see anything but dirt and horridness, Grandfather,” complained Ethel Brown.

Mr. Emerson looked out of the window thoughtfully for a moment.

“True,” he answered, “it’s not yet dark enough for the magic to work.”

“No wonder everything is sooty and grimy with those chimneys all around us throwing out tons and tons of soft coal smoke to settle over everything.  Don’t they ever stop?”

“They’re at it twenty-four hours a day,” returned her grandfather.  “But night will take all the ugliness into its arms and hide it; the sordidness and griminess will disappear and fairyland will come forth for a playground.  The ugly smoke will turn into a thing of beauty.  The queer point of it all is,” he continued, shaking his head sadly, “fairyland is there all the time and always beautiful, only you can’t see it.”

Dicky’s eyes opened wide and he gazed out of the window intent on peering into this mysterious invisible playground.

“Lots of things are like that,” agreed Roger.  “Don’t you remember how those snowflakes we looked at under the magnifying glass on Ethel Blue’s birthday burst into magnificent crystals?  You wouldn’t think a handful of earth—­just plain dirt—­was pretty, would you?  But it is.  Look at it through a microscope and see what happens.”