"Now what do you know about that?" he groaned. "Nothing happened after all. Just as things were at their liveliest, and the hero held out his arms, and the heroine—well, just then the old Abbé blundered in and...."
But there is something criminal and callous about such indifference as this.
TAMING THE FURNACE
Taming the Furnace
"And what the devil do you know about taming furnaces, anyway?" asks the reader, presuming that the reader has a somewhat abrupt style in conversation. "Here you go around bragging about being a bachelor and having inclinations for the monastic life and all that sort of rot"—meaning the bragging, of course—"and yet you have the nerve to write an article on how to handle a furnace. G'wan and teach your grandmother to suck eggs!"
Thereupon, the reader in torrid indignation drops the book and goes down into the cellar, and seizing a short shovel with a broken handle tosses half a ton of coal into the maw of the steel dragon there—a dragon which consumes its own heat and lets none of it get as far as the radiators.
Incidentally, why should it be regarded as the height of absurdity to teach one's grandmother to suck eggs? Why should one's grandmother be expected to know all about sucking eggs? Is one's grandmother a weasel that she should be universally regarded as a supreme exponent of this art? We are aware that this paragraph is in the nature of a digression, but we have all our life been puzzled to account for this curious tradition that grandmothers know everything to be known about removing the contents of eggs by the primitive process of suction. We feel quite sure that both our own personal and private grandmothers knew nothing about it. We are also sure that we would never have had the nerve to teach them how to do a thing so obviously vulgar and futile. Furthermore, no one's grandmother could afford to suck eggs at the present market quotations. So what would be the use, anyway, even if she did know how? Altogether this seems to us a very silly proverb.
But, to return to furnaces, we really do know something about them—not everything (what man does?), not even a great deal, perhaps, but still something. And we ought to know something, for we have wrestled in spirit and otherwise with every one of the fifty-odd varieties—hot air, hot water, steam, and everything that lies between. Some men are born furnace-tenders. Some learn it from plumbers. But we have had our knowledge forced upon us.
One of our earliest and least-treasured recollections is of an enormous old furnace in our grandfather's house—a mediæval contraption, all bricked-in, as big as a cottage, with a mouth the size of a pair of folding doors, and a capacity for coal which would make a twin-screw steamship turn a dark bottle-green. We used to be held up to the door of it when we had been very naughty, and have it explained to us that naughty boys were sent to a place bearing a general resemblance to that bed of red-hot coals. We do not recall that we had much joy of the prospect.