A School Teacher's First Chapter

by Mrs. H. E. G. AREY

The New York Teacher, 1855

The chief ornament and accommodation of my school room was a stick chimney-a thing which I had never seen before, but, whose merits I tested to my entire satisfaction during the winter. The fireplace had a back and jams of rough, misshapen stones, laid in mud, and extending three or four feet from the floor; the back jutting out a little beyond the outer wall of the building, and the jams just coming to the surface of the wall within. The cross piece by which these democratic jams were finished, was a stick of green timber, and from thence the wooden structure ascended upwards-stick upon stick precisely in the manner of a child's cob house; the whole fitting into the outer wall, according to the most indefinite rules of architecture. A rough, stone hearth, and two uneven and uneasy rocks, as the children called them, for andirons, completed this arrangement for a fire.

To my untutored eyes this structure had an ominous appearance, though it could not be said to bear the slightest approach to that which Downing calls "the favorite poison of America." There certainly was no danger there of our breathing "the vitiated air of close stoves," whatever other danger there might be. I was too busy during the first day of my school, in accustoming myself to the oddities and crudities by which I was surrounded to take in all the beauties of our warming apparatus. The structure did not take fire during the first day, but the second it did, and usually on every day thereafter, until we came to regard it simply as a spicy little episode in the monotonous routine of school life. The burnings never did much harm, however. The committee under whose supervision the school house was built, doubtless understood the capacities of green timber much better than I.

A single pail of water often sufficed to quench the fire, and when it did not, the boys would thrust large masses of snow in between the sticks until the fire in the chimney and in the fire-place went out together, and the hearth was flooded with ashes and water. The water on the hearth was of no consequence, however, as it ran off immediately through the cracks in the floor.

Sometimes during this operation, we would see a woman watching our efforts from the door of a neighboring cabin, but this was all the excitement it ever caused in the district. When this task was over we would close the door, rebuild the fire, and with heads and fingers well cooled from previous efforts, were quite ready to resume our mental labors.

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