modern house that is built to-day, in country or town, we expect
bathrooms and plenty of them. With us the presence of a few
bathtubs more or less creates no great amount of excitement--nor
does the mere sight of open plumbing particularly stir our people;
whereas in England a hotelkeeper who has bathrooms on the premises
advertises the fact on his stationery.

If in addition to a few bathrooms a Continental hotelkeeper has a
decrepit elevator he makes more noise over it than we do over a
Pompeian palmroom or an Etruscan roofgarden; he hangs a sign above
his front door testifying to his magnificent enterprise in this
regard. The Continental may be a born hotelkeeper, as has been
frequently claimed for him; but the trouble is he usually has no
hotel to keep. It is as though you set an interior decorator to
run a livery stable and expected him to make it attractive. He
may have the talents, but he is lacking in the raw material.

It was in a London apartment house, out Maida Vale way, that I
first beheld the official bathtub of an English family establishment.
It was one of those bathtubs that flourished in our own land at
about the time of the Green-back craze--a coffin-shaped, boxed-in
affair lined with zinc; and the zinc was suffering from tetter or
other serious skin trouble and was peeling badly. There was a
current superstition about the place to the effect that the bathroom
and the water supply might on occasion be heated with a device
known in the vernacular as a geezer.

The geezer was a sheet-iron contraption in the shape of a pocket
inkstand, and it stood on a perch in the corner, like a Russian
icon, with a small blue flame flickering beneath it. It looked