Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three

or four things that have been with man almost since his beginning;
which at least we hear of early in the centuries and often among
the tribes
Cast your eye round the room in which you sit, and select some three
or four things that have been with man almost since his beginning;
which at least we hear of early in the centuries and often among
the tribes. Let me suppose that you see a knife on the table,
a stick in the corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each of these
you will notice one speciality; that not one of them is special.
Each of these ancestral things is a universal thing;
made to supply many different needs; and while tottering pedants
nose about to find the cause and origin of some old custom,
the truth is that it had fifty causes or a hundred origins.
The knife is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pencils,
to cut throats; for a myriad ingenious or innocent human objects.
The stick is meant partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man down;
partly to point with like a finger-post, partly to balance with
like a balancing pole, partly to trifle with like a cigarette,
partly to kill with like a club of a giant; it is a crutch and a cudgel;
an elongated finger and an extra leg. The case is the same, of course,
with the fire; about which the strangest modern views have arisen.
A queer fancy seems to be current that a fire exists to warm people.
It exists to warm people, to light their darkness, to raise
their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their rooms,
to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories to their children, to make
checkered shadows on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles,
and to be the red heart of a man"s house and that hearth for which,
as the great heathens said, a man should die.