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    The Comforts of Home
    The Comforts of Home
    The Comforts of Home
    Ebook84 pages1 hour

    The Comforts of Home

    By Ralph Bergengren

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    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 25, 2013
    The Comforts of Home

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      Book preview

      The Comforts of Home - Ralph Bergengren

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Comforts of Home, by Ralph Bergengren

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: The Comforts of Home

      Author: Ralph Bergengren

      Release Date: August 9, 2011 [EBook #37017]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COMFORTS OF HOME ***

      Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed

      Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was

      produced from images available at The Internet Archive)

      THE COMFORTS OF HOME

      The

      COMFORTS of HOME

      BY

      RALPH BERGENGREN

      The Atlantic Monthly Press

      Boston

      Copyright, 1918, by

      The Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc.

      All Rights Reserved

      CONTENTS

      THOUGHTS WHILE GETTING SETTLED

      PROPERLY speaking, the new house was old. A hundred years and more had gone over its chimney,—down which, as we were to discover later, a hundred flies and more would come when the open fires had warmed it,—and within doors it would have charmed any amateur of the Colonial by the antiquity of its furnishings. Temporarily it belonged to me, my executors, administrators, and assigns. But there were limits to our possession. None of us might 'permit any hole to be drilled or made in the stone or brick-work of said building'; no 'sign or placard' might we place upon it; we might not 'over-load, damage, or deface' it; nor might we 'carry on any unlawful, improper, noisy, or offensive trade' in it. We had admitted that the glass was whole and in good order, and bound ourselves to keep it good, unless broken by fire, with glass of the same kind and quality. In case I became bankrupt I had agreed that the owner, the owner's executors, the owner's administrators, and the owner's assigns should treat me with every form of ignominy that the law has yet invented to make bankruptcy more distressing. Nor could I hold them responsible if our guests fell down the cellar stairs; although there I think they would be morally responsible, for a steeper flight of cellar stairs I simply cannot imagine.

      Of all documents there is hardly another so common as a lease, or more suspicious. Observe the lessor—a benevolent, dignified, but cautious person! Observe the lessee—a worm with criminal tendencies! Perhaps he is a decent sort of worm, but the lessor had better look out for him. Very likely he will commit murders in the dining-room, read the Contes Drolatiques in the library, play bass-drum solos in the parlor, and start a piggery in the cellar. One suspects that possibly the great army of hoboes is partly recruited from among supersensitive men who read their leases before signing them and preferred vagabondage to insult. But some of us control our sensitiveness. I, for example, read my lease; and when, having agreed mentally to post no placard myself, I discovered a clause allowing the lessor to decorate my residence with the information that it was

      FOR SALE

      I crossed that clause out!

      Observe the worm turning!

      It was the dining-room that had won us, formerly the kitchen and still complete—with the brick oven; the crane; the fat, three-legged pots and spider; a thing that, after much debate, we think must have been a bread-toaster; and a kind of overgrown curry-comb with which, so we imagine, the original dwellers were wont to rake the hot ashes from the brick oven. Also a warming-pan. And although these objects charm me, and I delight to live with them, I cannot but wonder whether a hundred years from now there may not be persons to furnish their dining-rooms with just such a stove as stands at present in my real kitchen; and perhaps to suspend beside it one of those quaint contraptions with which the jolly old chaps in the early twentieth century used to kill flies. I hear in imagination the host of that period explaining the implement to his wondering guests,—being expert in such matters, he will produce the technical term 'swat' with an air of easy familiarity,—and see him hanging it reverently up again beside the dear old stove and right over the picturesque old coal-hod. Perhaps,

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