Yet direct heat is an agreeable sensation.  I am not scientific enough to despise it, and have no taste for a winter residence on Mount Washington, where the thermometer cannot be kept comfortable even by boiling.  They say that they say in Boston that there is a satisfaction in being well dressed which religion cannot give.  There is certainly a satisfaction in the direct radiance of a hickory fire which is not to be found in the fieriest blasts of a furnace.  The hot air of a furnace is a sirocco; the heat of a wood-fire is only intense sunshine, like that bottled in Lacrimae Christi.  Besides this, the eye is delighted, the sense of smell is regaled by the fragrant decomposition, and the ear is pleased with the hissing, crackling, and singing,—­a liberation of so many out-door noises.  Some people like the sound of bubbling in a boiling pot, or the fizzing of a frying-spider.  But there is nothing gross in the animated crackling of sticks of wood blazing on the earth, not even if chestnuts are roasting in the ashes.  All the senses are ministered to, and the imagination is left as free as the leaping tongues of flame.

The attention which a wood-fire demands is one of its best recommendations.  We value little that which costs us no trouble to maintain.  If we had to keep the sun kindled up and going by private corporate action, or act of Congress, and to be taxed for the support of customs officers of solar heat, we should prize it more than we do.  Not that I should like to look upon the sun as a job, and have the proper regulation of its temperature get into politics, where we already have so much combustible stuff; but we take it quite too much as a matter of course, and, having it free, do not reckon it among the reasons for gratitude.  Many people shut it out of their houses as if it were an enemy, watch its descent upon the carpet as if it were only a thief of color, and plant trees to shut it away from the mouldering house.  All the animals know better than this, as well as the more simple races of men; the old women of the southern Italian coasts sit all day in the sun and ply the distaff, as grateful as the sociable hens on the south side of a New England barn; the slow tortoise likes to take the sun upon his sloping back, soaking in color that shall make him immortal when the imperishable part of him is cut up into shell ornaments.  The capacity of a cat to absorb sunshine is only equaled by that of an Arab or an Ethiopian.  They are not afraid of injuring their complexions.

White must be the color of civilization; it has so many natural disadvantages.  But this is politics.  I was about to say that, however it may be with sunshine, one is always grateful for his wood-fire, because he does not maintain it without some cost.