io HOUSE, GARDEN, AND FIELD 



air and cleanliness for the sake of mere warmth. They 

 will perhaps sleep in rooms as far superior to ours, as are 

 ours to the narrow sleeping cupboards, which we can still 

 see in Pompeii or in Haddon Hall. 



If steady progress in the past is a presage of progress 

 in the time to come, we have much ground for hope. In 

 the fifteenth century, just before the coming-in of the 

 industrial and scientific age, a labourer's cottage could be 

 built in a single day ; it had no chimney, no window, and 

 no floor but the trodden earth. Four stout posts, four 

 walls of straw and clay, and a roof of heather or reeds, 

 were enough to lodge not only the labourer and his family, 

 but his domestic animals as well. When long afterwards 

 hardworking men of humble rank attained what they 

 called comfort, they made it their first care to banish 

 hunger and cold, the worst enemies they had known. 

 Naturally enough they went too far, made their meals too 

 frequent and too plentiful, and thought it dangerous to 

 admit fresh air to their rooms, or to let cold water touch 

 their naked skin. We are now steadily overcoming the 

 love of coddling, and shall in time dare to live according 

 to nature. For a hundred years past the well-to-do 

 Englishman at least has loved the open window and the 

 morning tub. His example spreads, slowly we must admit, 

 but spreads nevertheless. Our posterity of the twenty- 

 first century, not only the wealthy, let us hope, but all 

 of them, may be able to boast like Remulus : " We are a 

 tough race, accustomed to plunge our children into the 

 river, and to harden them by the touch of cold water." 



We pride ourselves in this country on using more cold 

 water for washing than some other nations, but this excel- 

 lent practice did not begin with any Englishman. In the 

 days of the French Revolution, or indeed a little earlier, 

 the gospel of the Return to Nature began to be preached, 

 and among the converts were Englishmen who had the 

 ear of the public, such as the Edgeworths, Day (author 

 of Sandford and Merton) and Erasmus Darwin. Each 



