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222
A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Beverly, MA)
·
Lucy Larcom
15
Cooking-stoves
were
coming
into
fashion,
but
they
were
clumsy
affairs,
and
our
elders
thought
that
no
cooking
could
be
quite
so
nice
as
that
which
was
done
by
an
open
fire.
We
younger
ones
reveled
in
the
warm,
beautiful
glow,
that
we
look
back
to
as
to
a
remembered
sunset.
There
is
no
such
home-splendor
now.
When
supper
was
finished,
and
the
tea-kettle
was
pushed
back
on
the
crane,
and
the
backlog
had
been
reduced
to
a
heap
of
fiery
embers,
then
was
the
time
for
listening
to
sailor
yarns
and
ghost
and
witch
legends.
The
wonder
seems
somehow
to
have
faded
out
of
those
tales
of
eld
since
the
gleam
of
red-hot
coals
died
away
from
the
hearthstone.
The
shutting
up
of
the
great
fireplaces
and
the
introduction
of
stoves
marks
an
era;
the
abdication
of
shaggy
Romance
and
the
enthronement
of
elegant
Commonplace--sometimes,
alas!
the
opposite
of
elegant--at
the
New
England
fireside.
Have
we
indeed
a
fireside
any
longer
in
the
old
sense?
It
hardly
seems
as
if
the
young
people
of
to-day
can
really
understand
the
poetry
of
English
domestic
life,
reading
it,
as
they
must,
by
a
reflected
illumination
from
the
past.
What
would
"Cotter's
Saturday
Night"
have
been,
if
Burns
had
written
it
by
the
opaque
heat
of
a
stove
instead
of
at
his
"Wee
bit
ingle
blinkin'
bonnilie?"
New
England
as
it
used
to
be
was
so
much
like
Scotland
in
many
of
its
ways
of
doing
and
thinking,
that
it
almost
seems
as
if
that
tender
poem
of
hearth-and-home
life
had
been
written
for
us
too.
I
can
see
the
features
of
my
father,
who
died
when
I
was
a
little
child,
whenever
I
read
the
familiar
verse:--
Marker
Marker
Fine marker
White-out
Fine white-out
Circle
Paint
Unmarker
Hand
Scalpel
Dice
Sieve
Purify
Undo
Redo
Start over
