But none of these well-meant but inexperienced attacks ever daunted the spirit of this fire. It would splutter a moment with ill-concealed indignation, threatening a dozen times to go out in smoke, and then all of a sudden a little bubble of laughing flame would break out under one end of a log, and then another, and away it would go roaring up the chimney in a very ecstasy of delight. Now and then it would talk back; I have heard it many a time, when Mac and I would be sitting alone before it listening to its chatter. "Take a seat," it would crackle; "right in front, where I can warm you. Sit, too, where you can look into my face and see how ruddy and joyous it is. I'll not bore you; I never bored anybody--never in all my life. I am an endless series of surprises, and I am never twice alike. I can sparkle with merriment, or glow with humor, or roar with laughter, dependent on your mood, or upon mine. Or I can smoulder away all by myself, crooning a low song of the woods--the song your mother loved, your cradle song--so full of content that it will soothe you into forgetfulness. When at last I creep under my gray blanket of ashes and shut my eyes, you, too, will want to sleep--you and I, old friends now with our thousand memories." Only MacWhirter really understood its many moods--"Alexander MacWhirter, Room No. 3," the sign-board read in the hall below--and only MacWhirter could satisfy its wants; and so, after the first few months, no one dared touch it but our host, whose slightest nudge with the tongs was sufficient to kindle it into renewed activity. It was not long after this that a certain sense of ownership permeated the coterie. They yielded the chimney and its mechanical contrivances to MacWhirter and Lonnegan, but the blaze and its generous warmth belonged to them as much as to Mac. Soon chairs were sent up from the several studios, each member of the half-circle furnishing his own--the most comfortable he owned. Then the mugs followed, and the pipe-racks, and soon Sandy MacWhirter's wood fire in No. 3 became the one spot in the building that we all loved and longed for. And Mac was exactly fashioned for High Priest of just such a Temple of Jollity: Merry-eyed, round-faced, with one and a quarter, perhaps one and a half, of a chin tucked under his old one--a chin though that came from laughter, not from laziness; broad-shouldered, deep-chested, hearty in his voice and words, with the faintest trace--just a trace, it was so slight--of his mother-tongue in his speech; whole-souled, spontaneous, unselfish, ready to praise and never to criticise; brimming with anecdotes and adventures of forty years of experience--on the Riviera, in Sicily, Egypt, and the Far East, wherever his brush had carried him--he had all the warmth of his blazing logs in his grasp and all the snap of their coals in his eyes.