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THE JONATHAN PAPERS

by

ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE

       *       *       *       *       *

By Elisabeth Woodbridge

  DAYS OUT AND OTHER PAPERS.
  MORE JONATHAN PAPERS.
  THE JONATHAN PAPERS.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK

       *       *       *       *       *

THE JONATHAN PAPERS

by

ELISABETH WOODBRIDGE







[Illustration]

Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company

Copyright, 1912, by Elisabeth Woodbridge Morris




TO JONATHAN
AND TO ALL PERFECT COMRADESHIP
WHEREVER ITS JOYOUS SPIRIT IS FOUND
THIS LITTLE BOOK IS DEDICATED




Contents


  FOREWORD--ON TAKING ONE'S DESSERT FIRST                             ix
     I. A PLACID RUNAWAY                                               3
    II. AN UNPROGRESSIVE FARM                                         14
   III. A DESULTORY PILGRIMAGE                                        25
    IV. THE YELLOW VALLEY                                             38
     V. LARKSPURS AND HOLLYHOCKS                                      49
    VI. THE FARM SUNDAY                                               68
   VII. THE GROOMING OF THE FARM                                      87
  VIII. "ESCAPED FROM OLD GARDENS"                                   107
    IX. THE COUNTRY ROAD                                             114
     X. THE LURE OF THE BERRY                                        131
    XI. IN THE RAIN                                                  139
   XII. AS THE BEE FLIES                                             155
  XIII. A DAWN EXPERIMENT                                            171
   XIV. IN THE WAKE OF THE PARTRIDGE                                 183
    XV. BEYOND THE REALM OF WEATHER                                  199
   XVI. COMFORTABLE BOOKS                                            214
  XVII. IN THE FIRELIGHT                                             222

     The papers in this volume first appeared in the _Outlook_,
     the _Atlantic_, and _Scribner's_. The author wishes to
     express to the editors of these magazines her appreciation
     of their courtesy in permitting the republication of the
     papers.




Foreword

On Taking One's Dessert First


When we were children we used to "happen in" to the kitchen just before
luncheon to see what the dessert was to be. This was because at the
luncheon table we were not allowed to ask, yet it was advantageous to
know, for since even our youthful capacity had its limits, we found it
necessary to "save room," and the question, of course, was, how much
room?

Discovering some favorite dish being prepared, we used to gaze with
watering mouth, and, though knowing its futility, could seldom repress
the plea, "Mayn't we have our dessert now?" Of course we never did, of
course we waited, and of course, when that same dessert came to us,
properly served, at the proper time, after a properly wholesome luncheon
preceding, it found us expectant, perhaps, but not eager; appreciative,
but not enthusiastic. It was not to us what it would have been at the
golden moment when we begged for it.

In hours of unbridled hostility to domestic conditions we used sometimes
to plan for a future when we should be grown up, and then would we not
change this sorry scheme of things entire! Would we not have a larder,
with desserts in it, our favorite desserts--and would we not devour
these same, boldly, recklessly, immediately before the meal for which
they were intended! Just wouldn't we!

And afterward--just didn't we! Most youthful fancies are doomed to fade
unrealized, but this one was too fundamentally practical and sane. We
are grown up, we have a larder, with now and then toothsome desserts in
it, and now and then we grip our conscience till it cowers and is still,
we wait till the servants are out, we walk into our pantry--and then--

Yes, triumphant we still believe what once militant we maintained--that
the only way to eat cake is when it is just out of the oven, that the
only way to eat ice cream is to dip it out of the freezer, down under
the apple tree, in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon. Afterward, when it
appears in sober decorum, surrounded by all the appurtenances of
civilization, it is a very commonplace affair; out under the apple tree
it is ambrosia.

Why not go further? Why not take all our desserts in life when they
taste best, instead of at the proper time, when we don't care for them?
Desserts are, I suppose, meant to be enjoyed. Why not have them when
most enjoyable? I wonder if there is not a certain perverted
conscientiousness that leads us to this enforcement of our pleasures. I
am myself conscious that I can scarcely ever approach a pleasure with a
mind singly bent on enjoyment. I regard it with something like
suspicion, I hedge, I hesitate, I defer. What is the motive force here?
Is it an inherited asceticism, bidding us beware of pleasure as such? Is
it pride, which will not permit us to make unseemly haste toward our
desires? Is it a subtle self-gratification, which seeks to add zest,
tone, to our delights by postponing them? Is it fear of anticlimax,
which makes us save our pleasure for the last thing, that there may be
no descent afterward? Certainly the last was the motive in the case of
the little boy who, dining out, was given a piece of mince and one of
custard pie. He liked the mince best, therefore he saved it until the
last, and had just conscientiously finished the custard when his beaming
hostess said: "Oh, you like the custard best! Well, dear, you needn't
eat the other. Delia, bring another plate for Henry and I'll give him
another piece of the custard pie." Pathetic! Yet I confess my sympathy
with Henry has always been qualified by disapproval of his methods,
which, it seems to me, brought down upon him an awful but not wholly
undeserved penalty.

The incident is worth careful attention. For life, I believe, is
continually treating us as that benevolent but misguided hostess treated
the incomprehensible Henry. If we postpone our mince pie, it is often
snatched from us and we never get it at all. I knew a youth once who
habitually rode a bicycle that was too small for him. He explained that
he continued to do this because then, when at some future time he did
have one that fitted him, he would be so surpassingly comfortable! Soon
after, bicycles went out of fashion, and I fear the moment of supreme
luxury never came. His mince pie had, as it were, been snatched from
him. One of my friends wrote me once: "It seems to me I am always
distractingly busy just getting ready to live, but I never really
begin." Most of us are in the same plight. We are like the thrifty
housewife who kept pushing the week's work earlier and earlier, until it
backed up into the week before; yet with all her planning she never
succeeded in clearing one little spot of leisure for herself. She never
got her dessert at all. Probably she would not have enjoyed it if she
had had it. For the capacity to enjoy desserts in life is something not
to be trifled with. Children have it, and grown people can keep it if
they try, but they don't always try. I knew of a man who worked every
minute until he was sixty, getting rich. He did get rich. Then he
retired; he built him a "stately pleasure palace" and set about taking
his pleasure. And lo! he found that he had forgotten how! He tried this
and that, indoor and outdoor pleasures, the social and the solitary,
the artistic and the semi-scientific--all to no purpose. Here were all
the desserts that throughout his life he had been steadfastly pushing
aside; they were ranged before him to partake of, and when he would
partake he could not. And so he left his pleasure palace and went back
to "business."

We are not all so far gone as this, but few of us have the courage to
take our desserts when they are offered, or the free spirit to enjoy
them to the uttermost. I get up on a glorious summer morning and gaze
out at the new day. With all the strongest and deepest instincts of my
nature I long to go out into the green beauty of the world, to fling
myself down in some sloping meadow and feel the sunshine envelop me and
the warm winds pass over me, to see them tossing the grasses and tugging
at the trees and driving the white clouds across the blue, and to feel
the great earth revolving under me--for if you lie long enough you can
really get the sense of sailing through space. All this I long for--from
my window. Then I turn back to my unglorified little house--little,
however big, compared with the limitless world of beauty outside--and
betake myself to my day's routine occupations. I read my mail, I answer
letters, I go over accounts, I fly to the telephone and give orders and
make engagements. And at length, after hours of such stultifying
employment, I elect to call myself "free," and go forth to enjoy my
"well-earned" leisure. Fool that I am! As if enjoyment were a thing to
be taken up and laid down at will, like a walking-stick. As if one could
let the golden moment pass and hope to find it again awaiting our
convenience. Why can we not be like Pippa with her one precious day? But
if she had been born in New England do you suppose her day would have
been what it was? Would she have sprung up at daybreak with heart and
mind all alight for pleasure? Certainly not. She would have spent the
golden morning in cleaning the kitchen, and the golden afternoon in
clearing up the attic, and would have gone out for a little walk after
the supper dishes were washed, only because she thought she "ought" to
take a little exercise in the open air.

Duty and work are all very well, but we have bound ourselves up in them
so completely that we have almost lost the art of spontaneous
enjoyment. We can feel comfortable or uncomfortable, annoyed or
gratified, but we cannot feel simple, buoyant, instinctive enjoyment in
anything. We take our very pleasures under the name of duties-- "We
ought to take a walk," "We ought not to miss that concert," "We ought to
read" a certain book, "We ought" to go and see this friend, or invite
that one to see us. Those things that should be our spontaneous
pleasures we have clothed and masked until they no longer know
themselves. A pleasure must present itself under the guise of a duty
before we feel that we can wholly give ourselves over to it.

Ah, let us stop all that! Let us take our pleasures without apology. Let
us give up this fashion of shoving them away into the left-over corners
of our lives, covering their gleaming raiment with sad- robes,
and visiting them with half-averted faces. Let us consort with them
openly, gayly!




The Jonathan Papers




I

A Placid Runaway


Jonathan and I differ about a great many things; how otherwise are we to
avoid the sloughs of bigoted self-satisfaction? But upon one point we
agree: we are both convinced that on a beautiful morning in April or May
or June there is just one thing that any right-minded person really
wants to do. That is to turn a deaf ear to duty and a blind eye to all
other pleasures, and--find a trout brook. We are, indeed, able to
understand that duty may be too much for him--may be quite indifferent
to his deaf ear and shout in the other, or may even seize him by the
shoulders and hold him firmly in his place. He may not be able so much
as to drop a line in the brown water all through the maddening spring
days. But that he should not want to--ache to--this we cannot
understand. We do know that it is not a thing to be argued about. It is
temperamental, it is in the blood, or it is not. Jonathan and I always
want to.

Once it was almost the end of April, and we had been wanting to ever
since March had gone out like a lion--for in some parts of New England a
jocose legislature has arranged that the trout season shall begin on
April Fool's Day. Those who try to catch trout on April first understand
the joke.

"Jonathan," I said over our coffee, "have you noticed the weather
to-day?"

"Um-m-pleasant day," he murmured abstractedly from behind his newspaper.

"Pleasant! Have you felt the sunshine? Have you smelt the spring mud? I
want to roll in it!"

Jonathan really looked up over his paper. "Do!" he said, benevolently.

"Jonathan, let's run away!"

"Can't. There's a man coming at--"

"I know. There's always a man coming. Tell him to come to-morrow. Tell
him you are called out of town."

"But you have a lot of things to-day too--book clubs and Japanese clubs
and such things. You said last night--"

"I'll tell them _I'm_ called out of town too. I _am_ called--we're both
called, you know we are. And we've got to go."

"Really, my dear, you know I want to, but--"

"No use! It's a runaway. Get the time-table and see which is the first
train to anywhere--to nowhere--who cares where!"

Jonathan went, protesting. I let him protest. A man should have some
privileges.

We took the first train. It was a local, of course, and it trundled
jerkily along one of the little rivers we knew. When the conductor came
to us, Jonathan showed him our mileage book. "Where to?" he asked
mechanically, but stiffened to attention when Jonathan said placidly, "I
don't know yet. Where _are_ we going, my dear?"

"I hadn't thought," I said; "let's see the places on the map."

"Well, conductor," said Jonathan, "take off for three stations, and if
we don't get off then, you'll find us here when you come around, and
then you can take off some more."

The conductor looked us both over. We were evidently not a bridal
couple, and we didn't look quite like criminals--he gave us up.

When we saw a bit of country that looked attractive, we got off. That
was something I had always wanted to do. All my life I have had to go to
definite places, and my memory is full of tantalizing glimpses of the
charming spots I have passed on the road and could never stop to
explore. This time we really did it. We left the little railway station,
sitting plain and useful beside the track, went up the road past a few
farmhouses, over a fence and across a soft ploughed field, and down to
the little river, willow-bordered, shallow, golden-brown, with here and
there a deep pool under an overhanging hemlock or a shelving, fretted,
bush-tangled bank.

We sat down in the sun on a willow log and put our rods together. Does
anything sound prettier than the whir and click of the reel as one pulls
out the line for the first time on an April day? We sat and looked at
the world for a little, and let the wind, with just the faint chill of
the vanishing snows still in it, blow over us, and the sun, that was
making anemones and arbutus every minute, warm us through. It was almost
too good to begin, this day that we had stolen. I felt like a child with
a toothsome cake-- "I'll put it away for a while and have it later."

But, after all, it was already begun. We had not stolen it, it had
stolen us, and it held us in its power. Soon we wandered on, at first
hastening for the mere joy of motion and the freshness of things; then,
as the wind lessened and the sun shone hot in the hollows, loitering
more and more, dropping a line here and there where a deep pool looked
suggestive. Trout? Yes, we caught some. Jonathan pulled in a good many;
I got enough to seem industrious. I seldom catch as many as Jonathan,
though he tries to give me all the best holes; because really there are
so many other things to attend to. Men seem to go fishing chiefly to
catch fish. Jonathan spends half an hour working his rod and line
through a network of bushes, briers, and vines, to drop it in a chosen
spot in a pool. He swears gently as he works, but he works on, and
usually gets his fish. I don't swear, so I know I could never carry
through such an undertaking, and I don't try.

I did try once, when I was young and reckless. I headed the tip of my
rod, like a lance in rest, for the most open spot I could see. For the
fisherman's rule in the woods is not "Follow the flag," but "Follow your
tip," and I tried to follow mine. This necessitated reducing myself
occasionally to the dimensions of a filament, but I was elastic, and I
persisted. The brambles neatly extracted my hat-pins and dropped them in
the tangle about my feet; they pulled off my hat, but I pushed painfully
forward. They tore at my hair; they caught an end of my tie and drew out
the bow. Finally they made a simultaneous and well-planned assault upon
my hair, my neck, my left arm, raised to push them back, and my right,
extended to hold and guide that quivering, undulating rod. I was
helpless, unless I wished to be torn in shreds. At that moment, as I
stood poised, hot, baffled, smarting and stinging with bramble
scratches, wishing I could swear like a man and have it out, the air was
filled with the liquid notes of a wood thrush. I love the wood thrush
best of all; but that he should choose this moment! It was the final
touch.

I whistled the blue-jay note, which means "Come," and Jonathan came
threshing through the brush, having left his rod.

"Where are you?" he called; "I can't see you."

"No, you can't," I responded unamiably. "You probably never will see me
again, at least not in any recognizable form. Help me out!" The thrush
sang again, one tree farther away. "No! First kill that thrush!" I added
between set teeth, as a slight motion of mine set the brambles raking
again.

"Why, why, my dear, what's this?" Then, as he caught sight of me, "Well!
You are tied up! Wait; I'll get out my knife."

He cut here and there, and one after another, with a farewell stab or
scratch, the maddening things reluctantly let go their hold. Meanwhile
Jonathan made placid remarks about the proper way to go through brush.
"You go too fast, you know. You can't hurry these things, and you can't
bully them. I don't see how you manage to get scratched up so. I never
do."

"Jonathan, you are as tactless as the thrush."

"Don't kill me yet, though. Wait till I cut this last fellow. There! Now
you're free. By George! But you're a wreck!"

That was the last time I ever tried to "work through brush," as Jonathan
calls it. If I can catch trout by any method compatible with sanity, I
am ready to do it, but as for allowing myself to be drawn into a
situation wherein the note of the wood thrush stirs thoughts of murder
in my breast--at that point, I opine, sport ceases.

So on that day of our runaway I kept to open waters and preserved a
placid mind. The air was full of bird notes--in the big open woods the
clear "whick-ya, whick-ya, whick-ya" of the courting yellowhammers, in
the meadows bluebirds with their shy, vanishing call that is over almost
before you can begin to listen, meadowlarks poignantly sweet, song
sparrows with a lift and a lilt and a carol, and in the swamps the
red-wings trilling jubilant.

Noon came, and we camped under the sunny lee of a ridge that was all
abloom with hepaticas--clumps of lavender and white and rosy-lilac. We
found a good spring, and a fallen log, and some dead hemlock tips to
start a fire, and soon we had a merry blaze. Then Jonathan dressed some
of the trout, while I found a black birch tree and cut forked sticks for
broilers. Any one who has not broiled fresh-caught trout outdoors on
birch forks--or spice bush will do almost as well--has yet to learn what
life holds for him. Chops are good, too, done in that way. We usually
carry them along when there is no prospect of fish, or, when we are sure
of our country, we take a tin cup and buy eggs at a farmhouse to boil.
But the balancing of the can requires a happy combination of stones
about the fire that the brief nooning of a day's tramp seldom affords,
and baking is still more uncertain. Bacon is good, but broiling the
little slices--and how they do shrink!--takes too long, while frying
entails a pan. Curiously enough, a pan, in addition to two fish baskets
and a landing-net, does not find favor in Jonathan's eyes.

After luncheon and a long, lazy rest on our log we went back to the
stream and loitered down its bank. Pussy-willows, their sleek silver
paws bursting into fat, caterpillary things, covered us with yellow
pollen powder as we brushed past them. Now and then we were arrested by
the sharp fragrance of the spice bush, whose little yellow blossoms had
escaped our notice. In the damp hollows the ground was carpeted with the
rich, mottled green leaves and tawny yellow bells of the adder's-tongue,
and the wet mud was sweet with the dainty, short-stemmed white violets.
On the dry, barren places were masses of saxifrage, bravely cheerful; on
the rocky <DW72>s fragile anemones blew in the wind, and fluffy green
clumps of columbine lured us on to a vain search for an early blossom.

As the afternoon waned, and the wind freshened crisply, we guessed that
it was milking-time, and wandered up to a farmhouse where we persuaded
the farmer's wife to give us bread and cheese and warm new milk. We were
urged to "set inside," but preferred to take the great white pitcher of
milk out to the steps of the little back porch where we could hear the
insistent note of the little phoebe that was building under the eaves
of the woodshed. Our hostess stood in the doorway, watching in amused
tolerance as we filled and refilled our goblets. They were wonderful
goblets, be it said--the best the house afforded. Jonathan's was of
fancy green glass, all covered with little knobs; mine was yellow, with
a head of Washington stamped on one side, and "God Bless our Country" on
the other. Finally the good woman broke the silence-- "Guess your
mothers ain't never weaned ye." Which we were not in a position to
refute.

On our return train we found the same conductor who had taken us out in
the morning. As he folded back the green cover of our mileage book he
could not forbear remarking, quizzically, "Know how far you're goin'
to-night?"

"Jonathan," I said, as we settled to toast and tea before our home
fireplace that evening, "I like running away. I don't blame horses."




II

An Unprogressive Farm


Most of our friends, Jonathan's and mine, are occupying their summers in
"reclaiming" old farms. We have an old farm, too, but we, I fear, are
not reclaiming it, at least not very fast. We have made neither formal
gardens nor water gardens nor rose arches; we have not built marble
swimming-tanks, nor even cement ones; we have not naturalized
forget-me-nots in the brook or narcissus in the meadows; we have not
erected tea-houses on choice knolls, and after six years of occupancy
there is still not a pergola or a sundial on the place! And yet we are
happy.

To be happy on a farm like ours one must, I fancy, be either very old or
very unprogressive. While we are waiting to grow comfortably old, we are
willing to be considered unprogressive.

Very old and very, very unprogressive is the farm itself. There is
nothing on it but old apple trees, old lilac bushes, old rocks, and old
associations--and, to be sure, the old red house. But the old rocks,
piled on the hillsides, are unfailingly picturesque, whether dark and
dripping in the summer rains or silver gray in the summer suns. The
lilacs are delightful, too. In June they send wave upon wave of
fragrance in through the little windows, penetrating even to the
remotest corners of the dim old attic, while all day long about their
pale lavender sprays the great yellow and black butterflies hang
flutteringly. Best of all is the orchard; the old apple trees blossom
prodigally for a brief season in May, blossom in rosy-white, in
cream-white, in pure white, in green-white, transforming the lane and
the hill-<DW72>s into a bower, smothering the old house in beauty,
brooding over it, on still moonlight nights, in pale clouds of
sweetness. And then comes a wind, with a drenching rain, and tears away
all the pretty petals and buries them in the grass below. But there are
seldom any apples; all this exuberance of beauty is but a dream of
youth, not a promise of fruitage. Jonathan, indeed, tells me that if we
want the trees to bear we must keep pigs in the orchard to root up the
ground and eat the wormy fruit as it falls; but under these conditions I
would rather not have the apples. The orchard is old; why not leave it
to dream and rest and dream again?

The old associations are, I admit, of a somewhat mixed character. There
is the romance of the milk-room door, through which, in hoary ages past,
the "hired girl," at the ripe age of twelve, eloped with her
sixteen-year-old lover; there is the story of the cellar nail, a
shuddery one, handed down from a yet more remote antiquity; there are
tales of the "ballroom" on the second floor, of the old lightning-riven
locust stump, of the origin of the "new wing" of the house--still called
"new," though a century old. Not a spot, indoors or out, but has its
clustering memories.

Such an enveloping atmosphere of associations, no matter what their
quality, in a place where generations have lived and died, is of itself
a quieting thing. Life, incrusted with tradition, like a ship weighted
with barnacles, moves more and more slowly; the past appears more real
than the present. To the old this seems natural and right, to others it
is often depressing; but Jonathan and I like it. Our barnacle-clogged
ship pleases us--pleases me because I love the slow, drifting motion,
pleases Jonathan because--I regret to admit it--he thinks he can get all
the barnacles off--and then!--

For, whereas my unprogressiveness is absolute and unqualified,
Jonathan's is, I have discovered, tainted by a sneaking optimism, an
ineradicable desire and hope of improvement, which, though it does not
blossom rankly in pergolas and tea-houses, is none the less there, a
lurking menace. It inspired his suggestion regarding pigs in the
orchard, it showed itself even more clearly in the matter of the hens.

I have always liked hens. I doubt if mine are very profitable,--the farm
is not, in general, a source of profit, and we cherish no delusions
about it,--but I do not keep them for pecuniary gain. If they chance to
lay eggs, so much the better; if they furnish forth my table with
succulent broilers, with nutritious roasters, with ambrosial
chicken-pasties, I am not unappreciative; but I realize that all these
things might be had from my neighbors' barnyards. What I primarily value
my own hens for is their companionship. Talk about the companionship of
dogs and cats! Cats walk about my home, sleek and superior; they make me
feel that I am there on sufferance. One cannot even laugh at them, their
manner is so perfect. Dogs, on the other hand, develop an unreasoning
and tyrannous devotion to their masters, which is not really good for
either, though it may be morbidly gratifying to sentimental natures.

But hens! No decorous superiority here, no mush of devotion. No; for
varied folly, for rich and highly developed perversities, combining all
that is choicest of masculine and feminine foible--for this and much
more, commend me to the hen. Ever since we came to the farm, my sister
the hen has entertained me with her vagaries. Jaques's delight at his
encounter with Touchstone is pale compared with mine in their society.
Nothing cheers me more than to sit on a big rock in the barnyard and
watch the hens walking about. Their very gait pleases me--the way they
bob their heads, the "genteel" way they have of picking up their feet,
for all the world as though they cared where they stepped; the absent
and superior manner in which they "scratch for worms," their gaze fixed
on the sky, then cock their heads downwards with an indifferent air,
absently pick up a chip, drop it, and walk on! Did any one ever see a
hen really find a worm? I never did. There are no worms in our barnyard,
anyhow; Jonathan must have dug them all up for bait when he was a boy. I
have even tried throwing some real worms to them, and they always
respond by a few nervous cackles, and walk past the brown wrigglers with
a detached manner, and the robins get them later. And yet they continue
to go through all these forms, and we continue to call it "scratching
for worms."

Jonathan has nothing to do with my hens except to give advice. One of
his hobbies is the establishing of a breed of hens marked by
intelligence, which he maintains might be done by careful selection of
the mothers. Accordingly, whenever he goes to the roost to pick out a
victim for the sacrificial hatchet, he first gently pulls the tail of
each candidate in turn, and by the dim light of the lantern carefully
observes the nature of their reaction, choosing for destruction the one
whose deportment seems to him most foolish. In this way, by weeding out
the extremely silly, he hopes in time to raise the general intellectual
standard of the barnyard. But he urges that much more might be done if
my heart were in it. Very likely, but my heart is not. Intelligence is
all very well, but the barnyard, I am convinced, is no place for it.
Give me my pretty, silly hens, with all their aimless, silly ways. I
will seek intelligence, when I want it, elsewhere.

In another direction, too, Jonathan's optimistic temperament has found
little encouragement. This is in regard to the chimney swallows. When we
first came, these little creatures were one of my severest trials. They
were not a trial to Jonathan. He loved to watch them at dusk, circling
and eddying about the great chimney. So, indeed, did I; and if they had
but contented themselves with circling and eddying there, I should have
had no quarrel with them. I did not even object to their evolutions
inside the chimney. At first I took the muffled shudder of wings for
distant thunder, and when great masses of soot came tumbling down into
the fireplace, I jumped; but I soon grew accustomed to all this. I was
even willing to clean the soot out of my neat fireplace daily, while
Jonathan comforted