The German stove is not restricted to wood; peat is used in it, and coal bricks also. These coal bricks are made of waste coal dust pressed in a mold. In effect they are dirt and in fact are dirt cheap. The brick is about as big as your two fists; the stove will burn up twenty of them in half an hour, then it will need no more fuel for that day. This noble stove is at its very best when its front has a big square opening in it for a _visible_ wood fire. The real heating is done in the hidden regions of the great structure, of course--the open fire is merely to rejoice your eye and gladden your heart. America could adopt this stove, but does America do it? No, she sticks placidly to her own fearful and wonderful inventions in the stove line. She has fifty kinds, and not a rational one in the lot. The American wood stove, of whatsoever breed, is a terror. There can be no tranquillity of mind where it is. It requires more attention than a baby. It has to be fed every little while, it has to be watched all the time; and for all reward you are roasted half your time and frozen the other half. It warms no part of the room but its own part; it breeds headaches and suffocation, and makes one’s skin feel dry and feverish; and when your wood bill comes in you think you have been supporting a volcano. We have in America many and many a breed of coal stoves, also--fiendish things, everyone of them. The base-burner sort are handy and require but little attention; but none of them, of whatsoever kind, distributes its heat uniformly through the room, or keeps it at an unvarying temperature, or fails to take the life out of the atmosphere and leave it stuffy and smothery and stupefying. It seems to me that the ideal of comfort would be a German stove to heat one’s room, and an open wood fire to make it cheerful; then have furnace-heat in the halls. We could easily find some way to make the German stove beautiful, and that is all it needs at present. Still, even as it is to-day, it is lovely, it is a darling, compared with any “radiator” that has yet been intruded upon the world. That odious gilded skeleton! It makes all places ugly that it inhabits--just by contagion. It is certainly strange that useful customs and devices do not spread from country to country with more facility and promptness than they do. You step across the German border almost anywhere, and suddenly the German stove has disappeared. In Italy you find a foolish and ineffectual modification of it, in Paris you find an unprepossessing “adaptation” of our base-burner on a reduced pattern.