Why the English insist on speaking of coal in the plural when they use it only in the singular is more than I can understand.  Conceded that we overheat our houses and our railroad trains and our hotel lobbies in America, nevertheless we do heat them.  In winter their interiors are warmer and less damp than the outer air—­which is more than can be said for the lands across the sea, where you have to go outdoors to thaw.

If there are any outdoor sleeping porches in England I missed them when I was there; but as regards the ventilation of an English hotel I may speak with authority, having patronized one.  To begin with, the windows have heavy shades.  Back of these in turn are folding blinds; then long, close curtains of muslin; then, finally, thick, manifolding, shrouding draperies of some airproof woolen stuff.  At nighttime the maid enters your room, seals the windows, pulls down the shades, locks the shutters, closes the curtains, draws the draperies—­and then, I think, calks all the cracks with oakum.  When the occupant of that chamber retires to rest he is as hermetic as old Rameses the First, safe in his tomb, ever dared to hope to be.  That reddish aspect of the face noted in connection with the average Englishman is not due to fresh air, as has been popularly supposed; it is due to the lack of it.  It is caused by congestion.  For years he has been going along, trying to breathe without having the necessary ingredients at hand.

At that, England excels the rest of Europe in fresh air, just as it excels it in the matter of bathing facilities.  There is some fresh air left in England—­an abundant supply in warm weather, and a stray bit here and there in cold.  On the Continent there is none to speak of.

Chapter IV

Jacques, the Forsaken

In Germany the last fresh air was used during the Thirty Years’ War, and there has since been no demand for any.  Austria has no fresh air at all—­never did have any, and therefore has never felt the need of having any.  Italy—­the northern part of it anyhow—­is also reasonably shy of this commodity.

In the German-speaking countries all street cars and all railway trains sail with battened hatches.  In their palmiest days the Jimmy Hope gang could not have opened a window in a German sleeping car—­not without blasting; and trying to open a window in the ordinary first or second class carriage provides healthful exercise for an American tourist, while affording a cheap and simple form of amusement for his fellow passengers.  If, by superhuman efforts and at the cost of a fingernail or two, he should get one open, somebody else in the compartment as a matter of principle, immediately objects; and the retired brigadier-general, who is always in charge of a German train, comes and seals it up again, for that is the rule and the law; and then the natives are satisfied and sit in sweet content together, breathing a line of second-handed air that would choke a salamander.