I asked a well-informed Englishman how he could reconcile this discrepancy between bedrooms and bathrooms with the current belief that the English had a practical monopoly of the habit of bathing.  After considering the proposition at some length he said I should understand there was a difference in England between taking a bath and taking a tub—­that, though an Englishman might not be particularly addicted to a bath, he must have his tub every morning.  But I submit that the facts prove this explanation to have been but a feeble subterfuge.

Let us, for an especially conspicuous example, take the house that has thirty-four sleeping chambers and only two baths.  Let us imagine the house to be full of guests, with every bedroom occupied; and, if it is possible to do so without blushing, let us further imagine a couple of pink-and-white English gentlemen in the two baths.  If preferable, members of the opposite sex may imagine two ladies.  Very well, then; this leaves the occupants of thirty-two bedrooms all to be provided with large tin tubs at approximately the same hour of the morning.  Where would any household muster the crews to man all those portable tin tubs?  And where would the proprietor keep his battery of thirty-two tubs when they were not in use?  Not in the family picture gallery, surely!

From my readings of works of fiction describing the daily life of the English upper classes I know full well that the picture gallery is lined with family portraits; that each canvased countenance there shows the haughtily aquiline but slightly catarrhal nose, which is a heritage of this house; that each pair of dark and brooding eyes hide in their depths the shadow of that dread Nemesis which, through all the fateful centuries, has dogged this brave but ill-starred race until now, alas! the place must be let, furnished, to some beastly creature in trade, such as an American millionaire.

Here at this end we have the founder of the line, dubbed a knight on the gory field of Hastings; and there at that end we have the present heir, a knighted dub.  We know they cannot put the tubs in the family picture gallery; there is no room.  They need an armory for that outfit, and no armory is specified in the advertisement.

So I, for one, must decline to be misled or deceived by specious generalities.  If you are asking me my opinion I shall simply say that the bathing habit of Merrie England is a venerable myth, and likewise so is the fresh-air fetish.  The error an Englishman makes is that he mistakes cold air for fresh air.

In cold weather an Englishman arranges a few splintered jackstraws, kindling fashion, in an open grate somewhat resembling in size and shape a wallpocket for bedroom slippers.  On this substructure he gently deposits one or more carboniferous nodules the size of a pigeon egg, and touches a match to the whole.  In the more fortunate instances the result is a small, reddish ember smoking intermittently.  He stands by and feeds the glow with a dessert-spoonful of fuel administered at half-hour intervals, and imagines he really has a fire and that he is really being warmed.