Cleaning a chimney is a dirty job. Ordinarily, I would not dream of taking on such a task by myself. But when my wife and I moved into a charmingly ramshackle cottage in New Hampshire several years ago, we discovered that our chimney (to which a woodstove, our sole source of heat, was to be connected) had not been cleaned. Ever. My wife insisted that we do it ourselves. Being half thrifty Yankee and half practical Midwesterner, she had no sympathy for my horizontalist tendencies.

But how to do it? I vaguely remembered reading about the methods of chimney sweeps and promptly set about constructing a wire brush that could be dragged with a rope up and down the flue, thus scouring it clean. Within a few minutes, I had assembled, with chicken wire and bricks (for weight), a device that resembled a piece of modern sculpture.

My wife eyed the monstrosity dubiously but said nothing. This was early in our married life, and she had not yet learned to recognize the fatal point at which my knowledge of the facts runs out and unrestrained whimsy begins.

I explained that the next step was to drop a weighted rope down the chimney. The wire brush would be attached to the rope at the bottom end (where there was a door for cleaning out ashes and such), and then we would simply haul the brush up and down, cleaning the chimney without dirtying our hands. The whimsy was in full control by now.

While she waited in the basement, I mounted the roof, equipped with a rope and a rock about the size of a grapefruit. I wrapped one end of the rope around the rock, tied a knot, and then dropped it into the chimney.

The rock fell about 4 feet and then stopped, stuck in the constricted opening. It was clearly too large. So I pulled up the rope to try again with a smaller rock. All I got was rope. My knot had apparently slipped off.

The rock was too far down the chimney to reach with my arms. I spied on the roof a long 2x4 that the previous owners had used to hammer open a passageway for the smoke. With the madness of those whom the gods would destroy, I picked it up and began thumping the rock, hoping, I suppose, to force it down the flue with mighty strokes, like a colonial soldier loading his musket. Of course, I succeeded in wedging the rock irretrievably into the maw of the chimney.

When my wife finally came out from under the house to find out what was happening, I was sitting on the rooftop in an attitude of despair. I could think of no way