ered
shockingly unhealthy. The smoke from wood or turf is thought very
wholesome; but that from coal is just the reverse. Opposite the
bake-stone is the window; a very little one, much wider than it is high,
and rilled with exceedingly small diamond-shaped panes of very poor
greenish glass set in lead, there being so much lead and so little glass
that the room is but dark in the brightest sunshine. Indeed, it is
decidedly a sign of gentility that the house has any window at all,
beyond the square hole with the wooden shutter.

Up and down the room there are several stools, high and low; the high
ones serve when wanted as little movable tables. In the third corner is
a bread-rack, filled with hard oat-cake above, and the soft flat cakes
of wheat flour below; in the fourth stand several large barrels
containing salt fish, salt meat, flour, meal, and ale. From the top of
the room hang hams, herbs in canvas bags, strings of smoked fish, a few
empty baskets and pails, and anything else which can be hung up. The
rafters are so low that when the inmates move about they have every now
and then to courtesy to a ham or a pail, which would otherwise hit them
on the head. A door by the window leads into the street, and another
beyond the barrels gives access to the back yard.

How would you like to go back, gentle reader, to this style of life?
This was the way in which your forefathers lived, six hundred years
ago--unless they were very grand people indeed. Then they lived in a
big castle with walls two or three feet thick, and ate from gold or
silver plates, and had the luxury of a chimney in their dining-rooms.
But even then, there were a good many little matters in respect of which
I do not fancy you would quite like to change with them! Would you like
to eat with your fingers, and to find creeping creatures everywhere, and
to have _no_ books and newspapers, and no letters, and no shops except
in great towns, and no way of getting about except on foot or horseback,
and no lamps, candles, clocks or watches, china, spectacles, nor carpets
on the floor? Yet this was the way in which kings and queens lived, six
hundred years ago.

In respect of clothes, people were much better off. They dressed far
more warmly than we do, and used a great deal of fur, not only for
trimming or out-door wear, but to line their clothes in winter. But
their furs comprised much commoner and cheaper skins than we use;
ordinary people wore