negotiations, and the getting together and equipping of the Scottish army
for its southward march, had been a work of time. About Christmas 1643 it
was understood that the Scots were in readiness to march; but the precise
time when they might be expected to cross the border was yet in anxious
conjecture. [Footnote: Baillie, II. 83, 99, 104-5, and 114-15.]

It was an unusually severe winter, cold and snowy. The Londoners, in
especial, deprived of their coal from Newcastle, felt it severely.
Baillie particularly mentions the comfortable hangings of the Jerusalem
Chamber, and the good fire kept burning in it, as "some dainties in
London" at that date, and duly appreciated by the members of the
Assembly. [Footnote: Ibid. II. 106.] Among the printed broad-sheets of
the time that were hawked about London, I have seen one entitled
"_Artificial Fire; or, Coal for Rich and Poor: this being the offer of
an excellent new Invention_." The invention consists of a proposal to
the Londoners of a cheap substitute for coal, devised by a "Mr. Richard
Gesling, Ingineer, late deceased." Mr. Gesling's idea was that, if you
take brickdust, mortar, sawdust, or the like, and make up pasteballs
thereof mingled with the dust of sea-coal or Scotch coal, and with
stable-litter, you will have a fuel much more economical than coal
itself. But, though this is the practical proposal of the fly-sheet, its
main interest lies in its lamentation over the lack of the normal fuel.
"Some fine-nosed city dames," it says, "used to tell their husbands, 'O
husband! we shall never be well, we nor our children, whilst we live in
the smell of this city's sea-coal smoke! Pray, a country-house for our
health, that we may get out of this sea-coal smell!' But how many of
these fine-nosed dames now cry, 'Would to God we had sea-coal! Oh! the
want of fire undoes us! O the sweet sea-coal fires we used to have! how
we want them now: no fire to your sea-coal!'... This for the rich: a
word for the poor! The great want of fuel for fire makes many a poor