The range had been selected, and their talk of changes had begun with it, Mr Murchison pointing out the new idea in the boiler and Dr Drummond remembering his first kitchen stove that burned wood and stood on its four legs, with nothing behind but the stove pipe, and if you wanted a boiler you took off the front lids and put it on, and how remarkable even that had seemed to his eyes, fresh from the conservative kitchen notions of the old country.

He had come, unhappily, a widower to the domestic improvements on the other side of the Atlantic.

"Often I used to think," he said to Mr Murchison, "if my poor wife could have seen that stove how delighted she would have been! But I doubt this would have been too much for her altogether!" "That stove!" answered Mr Murchison.

"Well I remember it.

I sold it myself to your predecessor, Mr Wishart, for thirty dollars--the last purchase he ever made, poor man.