FIRESIDE ETIQUETTE.

Waikato Times, Volume 97, Issue 15979, 6 May 1924, Page 4

FIRESIDE ETIQUETTE.

Before the lire we turn our backs upon the world, and our own masters. If it he true, as Halifax said, that “our Government is like our climate, ’’ then it is true also, particularly in bleak weather, that we are sometimes glad to shut out the one with the other and to withdraw to the unperturbed solitude of our own hearth. For there, not only are we made free of this world’s dominations, of its trimmers, its busybodies, and its coid winds, but we are, as if my magic, admitted to a world of our own creation where there is none to dispute our rule. And the peculiar charm of this world which the grate contains is that it has been ours since childhood; that we have, as it were, populated it face by face, have ourselves invented its legends and history, and have been secret witnesses of all its glowing catastrophies. Much of our work-a-day life appears in it, hut in a shape transfigured. Our pleasures it retains and magnifies; our griefs it preserves and softens. From real pleasure and real sorrow we may, moreover, escape almost at will, by the simple expedient of taking up the poker, which thus becomes a wand, and besieging the castles in the fire. It is, of course, as we have reason to remember at this season of the year, an unsocial and even a selfish pastime. There are others besides ourselves who turn away from the climate and the Government, and at last from the book upon their lap. They also have their imaginative kingdom in our grate, and find their freedom behind our bars. They also breathlessly are pursuing an adventure begun long ago in a nursery of which we know nothing, and are righteously indignant if their adventure is interrupted by our impulsive poker. Perhaps it is for this reason that there has grown up everywhere an etiquette, almost a ritual, of the fireside ■supported by a host of convenient superstitions. You do not, except at your peril, disturb your hostess’s coals without her permission; you do not, in country cottages, where belief in domestic devils still persists, play any stranger’s tricks with the tongs, the poker, or the logs. Beware how you cross them, or stand them on end, or lay them down where they should not be; they arc protected by a dozen taboos. And, like most taboos which continue in our own time, these have a reason, if not an origin, in sound sense and ordinary convenience. An owner has a right to his own lire, and to the satisfaction of building it up in his own way. No visitor is less welcome than he who cannot keep his hands out of the grate, and no pedant more irritating than he who goes through the world with a fixed belief that li is wisdom alone can make a fire burn. He has his tricks —good tricks, it may be, but not our own. They may be useful in his own home, but our flames will not be persuaded by them. His first movement towards

the shovel is for us a presage of disaster. If he has his way, he will reduce all fairyland to smoky ruins. Therefore, because we dare not be rude, we confront him with a superstition. He may smile at our folly, but he leaves the fire alone.