ctures, the ancient residential houses, hastily built, without
imagination, without beauty, without common honesty, without even
comfort or convenience, in which the early twentieth century had
sheltered until scarcely one remained; we saved nothing but what
was beautiful or interesting out of all their gaunt and melancholy
abundance. The actual houses, of course, we could not drag to
our fires, but we brought all their ill-fitting deal doors, their
dreadful window sashes, their servant-tormenting staircases, their
dank, dark cupboards, the verminous papers from their scaly walls,
their dust and dirt-sodden carpets, their ill-designed and yet
pretentious tables and chairs, sideboards and chests of drawers,
the old dirt-saturated books, their ornaments--their dirty, decayed,
and altogether painful ornaments--amidst which I remember there
were sometimes even STUFFED DEAD BIRDS!--we burnt them all. The
paint-plastered woodwork, with coat above coat of nasty paint, that
in particular blazed finely. I have already tried to give you an
impression of old-world furniture, of Parload's bedroom, my mother's
room, Mr. Gabbitas's sitting-room, but, thank Heaven! there is
nothing in life now to convey the peculiar dinginess of it all. For
one thing, there is no more imperfect combustion of coal going on
everywhere, and no roadways like grassless open scars along the
earth from which dust pours out perpetually. We burnt and destroyed
most of our private buildings and all the woodwork, all our furniture,
except a few score thousand pieces of distinct and intentional
beauty, from which our present forms have developed, nearly all
our hangings and carpets, and also we destroyed almost every scrap
of old-world clothing. Only a few carefully disinfected types and
vestiges of that remain now in our museums.

One writes now with a peculiar horror of the dress of the old world.
The men's clothes were worn without any cleansing process at all,
except an occasional superficial brushing, for periods of a year
or so; they were made of dark obscurely mixed patterns to conceal
the stage of defilement they had reached, and they were of a felted
and porous texture admirably calculated to accumulate drifting
matter. Many women wore skirts of similar substances, and of so
long and inconvenient a form that they inevitably trailed among
all the abomination of our horse-frequented roads. It was our boast
in England that the whole of our population was b