When there was a small fire in the evening, I could stand on the clay hearth and look through the chimney at the stars as they twinkled and shone in their brightness. I could count a number of them as I stood there. Father drove into a log, back of the fire place, two iron eyes on which to hang a crane; they extended into the room about one foot. Around, and at one side of these he built the back of the fireplace of clear clay a foot thick at the bottom, but thinner when it got up to the sticks; after the clay dried he hung the crane. It is seen that we had no jambs to our fireplace. Father sometimes at night would get a backlog in. I have seen those which he got green, and very large, which were sometimes twenty inches through and five or six feet long. When he got the log to the door, he would take a round stick as large as his arm, lay it on the floor, so that his log would come crossways of it, and then crowd the log. I have seen him crowd it with a handspike and the stick would roll in opposite the fireplace. He would tell us children to stand back and take the chairs out of the way. Then he would roll the log into the fireplace, and very carefully so as not to break or crack the clay hearth, for mother had all the care of that, and wished it kept as nicely as possible. When he had the log on to suit him, he would say, "There, I guess that will last awhile." Then he would bring in two green sticks, six or eight inches through and about three feet long, and place them on the hearth with the ends against the backlog. These he called his Michigan andirons; said he was proud of them. He said they were wood instead of iron, to be sure, but he could afford to have a new pair whenever he wanted them. When he brought in a large fore-stick, and laid it across his andirons, he had the foundation for a fire, for twenty-four hours. On the crane hung two or three hooks, and on these, over the fire, mother did most of her cooking. As we had no oven, mother had what we called a bake kettle; this was a flat, low kettle, with a cast cover, the rim of which turned up an inch or two, to hold coals. In this kettle, she baked our bread. The way she did it; she would heat the lid, put her loaf of bread in the kettle, take the shovel and pull out some coals on the hearth, set the kettle on them, put the lid on and shovel some coals on to it. Then she would watch it, turn it round a few times, and the bread was done, and it came on the table steaming. When we all gathered around the family board we did the bread good justice. We were favored with what we called "Michigan appetites." Sometimes when we had finished our meal there were but few fragments left, of anything except the loaf, which was four or five inches through, a foot and a half across, and four and a half feet in circumference.