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 as though its sire might have been a snare-drum and its dam a dark lantern, and that it got its looks from its father and its heating powers from the mother’s side of the family.  And the plumbing fixtures were of the type that passed out of general use on the American side of the water with the Rutherford B. Hayes administration.  I was given to understand that this was a fair sample of the average residential London bathroom—­though the newer apartment houses that are going up have better ones, they told me.

In English country houses the dearth of bathing appliances must be even more dearthful.  I ran through the columns of the leading English fashion journal and read the descriptions of the large country places that were there offered for sale or lease.  In many instances the advertisements were accompanied by photographic reproductions in half tone showing magnificent old places, with Queen Anne fronts and Tudor towers and Elizabethan entails and Georgian mortgages, and what not.

Seeing these views I could conjure up visions of rooks cawing in the elms; of young curates in flat hats imbibing tea on green lawns; of housekeepers named Meadows or Fleming, in rustling black silk; of old Giles—­fifty years, man and boy, on the place—­wearing a smock frock and leaning on a pitchfork, with a wisp of hay caught in the tines, lamenting that the ’All ’asn’t been the same, zur, since the young marster was killed ridin’ to ’ounds; and then pensively wiping his eyes on a stray strand of the hay.

With no great stretch of the imagination I could picture a gouty, morose old lord with a secret sorrow and a brandy breath; I could picture a profligate heir going deeper and deeper in debt, but refusing to the bitter end to put the ax to the roots of the ancestral oaks.  I could imagine these parties readily, because I had frequently read about both of them in the standard English novels; and I had seen them depicted in all the orthodox English dramas I ever patronized.  But I did not notice in the appended descriptions any extended notice of heating arrangements; most of the advertisements seemed to slur over that point altogether.

And, as regards bathing facilities in their relation to the capacities of these country places, I quote at random from the figures given:  Eighteen rooms and one bath; sixteen rooms and two baths; fourteen rooms and one bath; twenty-one rooms and two baths; eleven rooms and one bath; thirty-four rooms and two baths.  Remember that by rooms bedrooms were meant; the reception rooms and parlors and dining halls and offices, and the like, were listed separately.