If stoves or other local radiators are used, you must of course provide for the entrance of pure air as well as the exit of the impure.  With two openings in the ceiling, the air will commonly ascend one and descend the other.  Open fireplaces, whether for wood or coal, are in favor with those who have learned to love fresh air, besides being, for their cheerfulness, an unfailing antidote to melancholy, and other selfish, spiritual ills.

The truth in regard to their healthfulness is simply that they compel us to sacrifice a large amount of fuel to the goddess of ventilation, far more than would be needed to give us a better state of the atmosphere, if applied in some other way; for the fire itself is hungry for oxygen, fireplaces for wood are mightily prone to smoke, and anthracite coal releases its poisonous gases at times so rapidly that none but the most voracious chimney will carry them safely away.  To answer your questions directly:  with a good stove in the hall and in each of the rooms not commonly used, you would probably afford one or two open fires for those constantly occupied, and keep comfortable with less outlay for fuel than with a furnace.  But you would need an accommodating fool to make your fires, and an industrious philosopher to keep them burning.  In this matter of warming and ventilating the more you know the more you will wish to learn.  My hope is to set you thinking and studying.  Read Dr. George Derby’s little book on Anthracite and Health, from which I have drawn already for your benefit; read the statistics of the increase of pulmonary diseases; get the physiological importance of fresh air so clearly before your mind’s eye that your dinner seems a secondary consideration, and don’t be deceived by any bigoted commentators, or forget to use your own common-sense.

While warming our backs we may dispose of some adjacent matters.  You can make a very pretty fireplace for wood of the common buff-colored fire-bricks, either alone or variegated with good common red bricks; a hearth of encaustic tile, pressed bricks, or even Portland cement.  Let the hearth be a generous one, two and a half feet wide, and at least two feet longer than the width of the fireplace, if you mean it for actual use.  You must not suppose I object to cheap things because they are cheap and therefore common.  The more so the better if they have real merit; but the marbleized slate mantels so abundant have not enough intrinsic beauty to justify them in supplanting the more honest and unpretending ones of wood.  Real marble ought to be too expensive for such houses as yours.

[Illustration:  BRICK FIREPLACE.]

With a furnace your house becomes a lumber-kiln, and any wood that has not been tried as by fire will, under its influence, warp and crack and shrink; in carpenters’ phrase, “it tears the finish all to pieces.”  The rapid shrinking of the joists and studs near the hot-air pipes is also apt to cause cracks in the plastering that would never appear if the whole frame could shrink evenly, for shrink it will more or less.  The application of these remarks would be, putting in the furnace as soon as possible, and keeping it steadily at work drying sap from the wood and water from the plastering till it enters upon its legitimate mission of warming the house.