ty pounds. And now I am trying to
teach the rest of the family. What I complain about the family is that
they do not seem anxious to learn.

"You do it," they say, pressing the coal scoop into my hand: "it makes us
nervous."

It is a pretty, patriarchal idea: I stand between the trusting, admiring
family and these explosive stoves that are the terror of their lives.
They gather round me in a group and watch me, the capable, all-knowing
Head who fears no foreign stove. But there are days when I get tired of
going round making up fires.

Nor is it sufficient to understand only one particular stove. The
practical foreigner prides himself upon having various stoves, adapted to
various work. Hitherto I have been speaking only of the stove supposed
to be best suited to reception rooms and bedrooms. The hall is provided
with another sort of stove altogether: an iron stove this, that turns up
its nose at coke and potato-peelings. If you give it anything else but
the best coal it explodes. It is like living surrounded by peppery old
colonels, trying to pass a peaceful winter among these passionate stoves.
There is a stove in the kitchen to be used only for roasting: this one
will not look at anything else but wood. Give it a bit of coal, meaning
to be kind, and before you are out of the room it has exploded.

Then there is a trick stove specially popular in Belgium. It has a
little door at the top and another little door at the bottom, and looks
like a pepper-caster. Whether it is happy or not depends upon those two
little doors. There are times when it feels it wants the bottom door
shut and the top door open, or _vice versa_, or both open at the same
time, or both shut--it is a fussy little stove.

Ordinary intelligence does not help you much with this stove. You want
to be bred in the country. It is a question of instinct: you have to
have Belgian blood in your veins to get on comfortably with it. On the
whole, it is a mild little stove, this Belgian pet. It does not often
explode: it only gets angry, and throws its cover into the air, and
flings hot coals about the room. It lives, generally speaking, inside an
iron cupboard with two doors. When you want it, you open these doors,
and pull it out into the room. It works on a swivel. And when you don't
want it you try to push it back again, and then the whole thing tumbles
over, and the girl throws her hands up to Heaven and says, "Mon Dieu!"
and scream