A Drift-Wood Fire

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But this domestic hearth of ours holds only, besides its drift-wood, the peaceful records of the day,--its shreds and fragments and fallen leaves. As the ancients poured wine upon their flames, so I pour rose-leaves in libation; and each morning contributes the faded petals of yesterday's wreaths. All our roses of this season have passed up this chimney in the blaze. Their delicate veins were filled with all the summer's fire, and they returned to fire once more,--ashes to ashes, flame to flame. For holding, with Bettina, that every flower which is broken becomes immortal in the sacrifice, I deem it more fitting that their earthly part should die by a concentration of that burning element which would at any rate be in some form their ending; so they have their altar on this bright hearth.

Let us pile up the fire anew with drift-wood, Annie. We can choose at random; for our logs came from no single forest. It is considered an important branch of skill in the country to know the varieties of firewood, and to choose among them well. But to-night we have the whole Atlantic shore for our wood-pile, and the Gulf Stream for a teamster. Every foreign tree of rarest name may, for aught we know, send its treasures to our hearth. Logwood and satinwood may mingle with cedar and maple; the old cellar floors of this once princely town are of mahogany, and why not our fire? I have a very indistinct impression what teak is; but if it means something black and impenetrable and nearly indestructible, then there is a piece of it, Annie, on the hearth at this moment.

It must be owned, indeed, that timbers soaked long enough in salt-water seem almost to lose their capacity of being burnt. Perhaps it was for this reason that, in the ancient "lyke-wakes" of the North of England, a pinch of salt was placed upon the dead body, as a safeguard against purgatorial flames. Yet salt melts ice, and so represents heat, one would think; and one can fancy that these fragments should be doubly inflammable, by their saline quality, and by the unmerciful rubbing which the waves have given them. I have noticed what warmth this churning process communicates to the clotted foam that lies in tremulous masses among the rocks, holding all the blue of ocean in its bubbles. After one's hands are chilled with the water, one can warm them in the foam. These drift-wood fragments are but the larger foam of shipwrecks.

What strange comrades this flame brings together! As foreign sailors from remotest seas may sit and chat side by side, before some boarding-house fire in this seaport town, so these shapeless sticks, perhaps gathered from far wider wanderings, now nestle together against the backlog, and converse in strange dialects as they burn. It is written in the Heetopades of Veeshnoo Sarma, that, "as two planks, floating on the surface of the mighty receptacle of the waters, meet, and having met are separated forever, so do beings in this life come together and presently are parted." Perchance this chimney reunites the planks, at the last moment, as death must reunite friends.