A Furnace Reminiscence.
Ironton Register, June 29, 1899.
For the Register.
For those who have spent a portion of their lives among the furnace hills, the memories of those years will never fade. There was an indescribable fascination about it all, and now that the iron business is bright again, our minds naturally revert to other years when the furnaces prospered and when they did not. The incident I relate occurred during the latter active years of a now abandoned charcoal furnace in the Hanging Rock Iron Region.
My father was one of the businessmen at the furnace, and my brother was a clerk at the coal works three miles distant. Our home was on the hill back of the furnace, and from its portice wreathed with a luxuriant climbing rose, the Seven Sisters, we could hear the church bells of the city and occasionally hear the town clock strike.
The house was one of the oldest on the furnace ground, built of logs and, at a later day, weatherboarded, painted, and plastered. In the rear were numerous additions, including a long porch, a summer kitchen, and, back of that, the coal house for which part of the hill slope had been cut away, leaving one side but a short distance from the ground and its roof a few feet lower than the roof of kitchen and porch. At the head of the front stairway was the door of the sleeping room occupied by my sister and myself; at the left was a window overlooking the rear part of the house.
The intense heat of that Summer told my father’s health seriously, as he attended to his many duties with unflagging exertion. At length, toward the close of the Summer, he was compelled to stop for rest and for treatment. By telephone, we summoned a physician from the city who came, prescribed, installed me as a nurse, and ordered quiet and rest for my patient, saying they were more necessary than the drugs he had left.
He gave me to leave the next day to the village five miles distant to attend to an important business matter which might suffer by delay. I did this after first trying to find the doctor by telephone and failing to find him. On my way, I passed my brother’s office, found him about to start town, and asked him to report to the doctor for me.
The moonlight that night was of the brightest. I distinctly recall the sharp shadows of the many trees in our yard as I sat by the vine-covered window of my father’s room. As it approached midnight, he insisted that I go to sleep, and I started to obey him. Reaching the top of the stairs, I rested my chin on my hands and my elbows on the wide sill of the open window there to take in once more the unusual brilliancy of the night.
It was a scene to arouse the finest and best in impulse and emotion. Irving tells us the Andalusian moonlight causes the Albambra to lose the stains of Time and to gleam with its original whiteness; so on that night, only the beauties of the surroundings claimed attention, and it could easily seem that the heavenly and the natural worlds were not so widely separated.
However, I was not allowed much time for uninterrupted thought. Leaning out farther to look from our wooded hill to the bare one across the valley, I saw, in the shadow on the roof, the form of a man. He had not seen me, and there he was, on all fours, astride the comb of the roof, making his way toward my window, which had been taken out on account of the heat.
I thought of the sleeping girls in the next room and thought of my father, who must on no account be disturbed. Hurrying to their bed, I roused the older sister, not easy for the care-free girls who thought it no discount to be able to climb all but two of our sixty trees or to catch, curry, and harness a horse, as well as to cultivate flowers and practice music, hours at a time, were sleeping just as we might expect them to sleep after such employment.
I told her to lock themselves in, and I would run past that window down the stairs, lock the door at the foot, and the burglar then could get into but one room, the spare bedroom. “Nothing succeeds like success,” and nothing fails like the lack of it. As we went to the door, here he came, feet first, in at the window. Of course, I screamed, but I closed and locked the door, thinking to run the length of the house to the back stairs, then through the lower rooms to lock the door at the foot of the front stairs. That program was never carried out.
That scream had roused everyone in the house. The man shook the door and called, “Say, E., what are you yelling like a Comanche Indian for? Don’t you know your own brother?” Assured of his identity, I opened the door, and there he stood, while at the lower door was our father, lamp in hand, asking in that voice that never through all the years was harsh to us, “Children, what is the matter?” Then followed a general accounting for ourselves
Brother’s story was this: The doctor had sent more medicine by him to our father, and after closing the store that night, he walked over home to bring it. Supposing all were asleep, he left his shoes on the porch and tried to enter the house without disturbing us. E. F. F.
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