Garth
A Novel (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Garth: A Novel

Every clear morning, for more than two hundred year past, the rising sun had thrown across the broad hip-roof of Urmhurst the shadow of its eastern chimney. The earliest beams, though fresh and pure from their ocean-bath, yet scrupled not to embrace the weather-worn old shaft, or to kiss warmly its smoke-blackened mouth.

The chimney, for its part, seldom suffered these kind greetings to pass without due recognition. In the winter months its reply was a jolly puff of blue smoke, odorous of the pungent spirit of the great pine-log which had been kindled on the hearth below. But its summer response was livelier and, perhaps, more poetical. First would be heard a mysterious, soft rumbling and twittering, as though the venerable structure were cleaning its sooty throat to say good-morning; and anon, like cheerful thoughts born of an aged heart, forth would flutter, from their abode in the cavernous interior, a rejoicing flock of chimney-swallows.

There were dozens and scores of them. Hardly in all New England, and certainly not in New Hampshire, could be found such another chimney for swifts as this eastern one of Urmhurst - so tall was it, so roomy, so full of convenient holes and crevices. Here had they builded through generations innumerable; each head of a family, at his decease, jealously transmitting the chosen ancestral cranny to the eldest son. But even the largest chimneys have a limit to their capacity for accommodating lodgers; and, during the last century or so, there must have occurred in the swift colony many sad but unavoidable family partings. Every year a certain contingent must go forth to seek their homes elsewhere. They would cluster together upon the brink of their old dwelling; and perhaps the less experienced among them would ask why they need go farther than just across the roof, where the western chimney, to all appearances the very twin of the eastern, upreared itself in silent invitation.

"Ah, my dear child," some wise old cock would reply, whetting his beak against a brick, and then tipping his head sagely to one side, "that site is not so eligible as it looks to be. Not a bird of us all has ever I settled there. The air thereabouts is very i feverish and unwholesome. In short, as I said before, it's not so eligible as -"

"But what makes the air unwholesome, grandpa" the youngster would break in.

"Well, you see, it's called the kitchen-chimney; and wherever, in your future career, you come across a chimney that is called a kitchen-chimney, don't go near it.

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