She Apologized, But Still She Carried Away The
Coals, And We Were Left To Rekindle The Zeal Of Our Stove As Best We
Could.
It was not a large stove, and it seemed to feel its inadequacy to
the office of taking the
Chill off that vast, dim room, where it
cowered, dark and low upon the floor, with a yearning, upward stretch of
its pipe lost in space before it reached the lowermost goddess in the
allegory frescoed on the ceiling. If it had been a white porcelain
stove, that might have helped, but it was of a gloomy earthen color that
imparted no more cheer than warmth.
We rebuilt our fire, after many repeated demands for kindling, which had
apparently to be sawed and split in a distant wood-yard before we could
get it, and then the long, arctic night set in, unrelieved by the noisy
gayeties of the cafe across the way. These burst from time to time the
thin film of sleep which formed like a coating of ice over the
consciousness, and then one could only get up and put more wood into the
despairing stove and more clothes on the beds. Well for us that we had
thought to bring all our travelling rugs with us in straps, instead of
abandoning them with our other baggage in the station till next day!
But, even with these heaping the hotel blankets and com-forters, we
shivered, and a superannuated odor that had lurked in the recesses of
those rooms, to which the sun or wind had never pierced, grew with the
growing cold, and haunted the night like something palpable as well as
sensible - the materialization of smells dead and buried there long ago.
It was wonderful how little way the electric bulb shed its beams in that
naughty air; it would not even light the page which at one time was
opened in the vain hope that the author would help the benumbing cold to
bring torpor if not slumber to the weary brain.
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