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argued that the English cold
would not chill you if only you stayed out-of-doors in it.
Why will not travellers be honest with foreign countries? Is it because
they think they may some day come back? For my part, I am going to
be heroic, and say that the in-doors cold in England is constant
suffering to the American born. It is not that there is no sizzling or
crackling radiator, no tropic-breathing register; but that the grate in
most of the houses that the traveler sees, the public-houses namely,
seems to have shrunken to a most sordid meanness of size. In Exeter,
for example, where there is such a beautiful cathedral, one found a
bedroom grate of the capacity of a quart pot, and the heating

capabilities of a glowworm. I might say the same of the Plymouth grate,
but not quite the same of the grates of Bath or Southampton; if I pause
before arriving at the grate of London, it is because daring must stop
somewhere. I think it is probable that the American, if he stayed long
enough, would heed the injunction to suffer and be strong from the cold,
as the Englishman has so largely done, but I am not sure. At one point
of my devious progress to the capital I met an Englishman who had
spent ten years in Canada, and who constrained me to a mild
deprecation by the wrath with which he denounced the in-doors cold he
had found everywhere at home. He said that England was a hundred,
five hundred, years behind in such matters; and I could not deny that,
even when cowering over the quart pot to warm the hands and face, one
was aware of a gelid mediaeval back behind one. To be warm all round
in an English house is a thing impossible, at least to the traveller, who
finds the natives living in what seems to him a whorl of draughts. In
entering his own room he is apt to find the window has been put down,
but this is not merely to let in some of the outside warmth; it is also to
make a current of air to the open door. Even if the window has not been
put down, it has always so much play in its frame, to allow for swelling
from the damp, that in anything like dry weather the cold whistles
round it, and you do not know which way to turn your mediaeval back.
In the corridors of one of the provincial hotels there were radiators, but
not hot ones, and in a dining-room where they were hot the natives
found them oppressive, while the foreigners were warming their fingers
on the bottoms of their plates. Yet it is useless for these to pretend that
the suffering they experience has not apparently resulted in the strength
they see. Our contemporary ancestors are a splendid-looking race, in
the higher average, and if in the lower average they often look pinched
and stunted, why, we are not ourselves giants without exception. The
ancestral race does often look stunted and poor; persons of small build
and stature abound; and nature is
"So careful of the single type"
of beefy Briton as to show it very rarely. But in the matter of
complexion, if we count that a proof of health, we are quite out of it in

comparison with the English, and beside them must look like a nation
of invalids. There are few English so poor as not, in youth at least, to
afford cheeks of a redness which all our money could not buy with us. I
do not say the color does not look a little overdone in cases, or that the
violent explosion of pinks and roses, especially in the cheeks of small
children, does not make one pause in question whether paste or putty
might not be more tasteful. But it is best not to be too critical. Putty and
paste, apart from association, are not pretty tints, and pinks and roses
are; and the English children look not only fresher but sturdier and
healthier than ours. Whether they are really so I do not know; but I
doubt if the English live longer than we for living less comfortably.
The lower classes seem always to have colds; the middle classes,
rheumatism; and the upper, gout, by what one sees or hears.
Rheumatism one might almost say (or quite, if one did not mind what
one said) is universal in England, and all ranks of society have the
facilities for it in the in-doors cold in which they otherwise often
undeniably flourish. At the end, it is a question of whether you would
rather be warm and well, or cold and well; we choose the first course
and