well as a number of Americans who come to these resorts. The hotels at
these places are generally excellent from the English point of view,
which differs somewhat from the American. Probably there is no one point
on which the difference is greater than the precise temperature that
constitutes personal comfort and makes a fire in the room necessary. On
a chilly, muggy day when an American shivers and calls for a fire in the
generally diminutive grate in his room, the native enjoys himself or
even complains of the heat, and is astonished at his thin-skinned
cousin, who must have his room--according to the British notion--heated
to suffocation. The hotel manager always makes a very adequate charge
for fires in guest-rooms and is generally chary about warming the
corridors or public parts of the hotel. In one of the large London
hotels which actually boasts of steam heat in the hallways, we were
amazed on a chilly May day to find the pipes warm and a fine fire
blazing in the great fireplace in the lobby. The chambermaid explained
the astonishing phenomenon: the week before several Americans had
complained frequently of the frigid atmosphere of the place without
exciting much sympathy from the management, but after they had left the
hotel, it was taken as an evidence of good faith and the heat was turned
on. But this digression has taken me so far away from Penzance that I
may as well close this chapter with it.




VII

FROM CORNWALL TO SOUTH WALES