rough the icy air at fifteen miles an hour, and refuse to go
inside, even to oblige a lady. Yet in railway carriages, in which you
could grill a bloater by the simple process of laying it underneath the
seat, they will insist on the window being closed, light cigars to keep
their noses warm, and sit with the collars of their fur coats buttoned up
around their necks.

In their houses they keep the double windows hermetically sealed for
three or four months at a time: and the hot air quivering about the
stoves scorches your face if you venture nearer to it than a yard. Travel
can broaden the mind. It can also suggest to the Britisher that in some
respects his countrymen are nothing near so silly as they are supposed to
be. There was a time when I used to sit with my legs stretched out
before the English coal fire and listen with respectful attention while
people who I thought knew all about it explained to me how wicked and how
wasteful were our methods.

All the heat from that fire, they told me, was going up the chimney. I
did not like to answer them that notwithstanding I felt warm and cosy. I
feared it might be merely British stupidity that kept me warm and cosy,
not the fire at all. How could it be the fire? The heat from the fire
was going up the chimney. It was the glow of ignorance that was making
my toes tingle. Besides, if by sitting close in front of the fire and
looking hard at it, I did contrive, by hypnotic suggestion, maybe, to
fancy myself warm, what should I feel like at the other end of the room?

It seemed like begging the question to reply that I had no particular use
for the other end of the room, that generally speaking there was room
enough about the fire for all the people I really cared for, that sitting
altogether round the fire seemed quite as sensible as sulking by one's
self in a corner the other end of the room, that the fire made a cheerful
and convenient focus for family and friends. They pointed out to me how
a stove, blocking up the centre of the room, with a dingy looking
fluepipe wandering round the ceiling, would enable us to sit ranged round
the walls, like patients in a hospital waiting-room, and use up coke and
potato-peelings.

Since then I have had practical experience of the scientific stove. I
want the old-fashioned, unsanitary, wasteful, illogical, open fireplace.
I want the heat to go up the chimney, instead of stopping in the room and
giving me a headache, and