You're a regular salamander." He laughed--warming his hands at the blaze.

"Yes, I would rather be hungry than cold, any day.

Love, our one extravagance is certainly coals.

A grand fire this! I do like it so!" She called him "foolish;" but smoothed down with a quiet kiss the forehead he lifted up to her as she stood beside him, looking as if she would any day have converted the whole house into fuel for his own private and particular benefit.
"Little ones all in bed, of course ?" "Indeed, they would have lain awake half the night--those naughty boys--talking of Longfield.

You never saw children so delighted." "Are they ?" I thought the tone was rather sad, and that the father sat listening with less interest than usual to the pleasant little household chronicle, always wonderful and always new, which it was his custom to ask for and have, night after night, when he came home,--saying it was to him, after his day's toil, like a "babbling o' green fields." Soon it stopped.
"John dear, you are very tired ?" "Rather." "Have you been very busy all day ?" "Very busy." I understood, almost as well as his wife did, what those brief answers indicated; so, stealing away to the table where Guy's blurred copy-book and Edwin's astonishing addition sums were greatly in need of Uncle Phineas, I left the fire-side corner to those two.