Now, physical ventilation—that which affects to imitate the processes of nature—is a more dangerously specious business. Its chief agent is heat. In nature, it is said, the sun is Lord High Ventilator. He rarefies the air in one place by his heat, elsewhere permits cold, and lets the air be dense; the thin air rises, and the dense air rushes to supply its place; so we have endless winds and currents—nature’s ventilating works. It is incredible that sane men should have thought this system fit for imitation. It is a failure. Look at the hot department, where a traveler sometimes has to record that he lay gasping for two hours upon his back, until some one could find some water for him somewhere. Let us call that Africa, and who can say that he enjoys the squalls of wind rushing toward the desert? Let us think of the Persian and the Punic wars, when fleets which had not learned to play bo-peep with ventilating processes, strewed Mediterranean sands with wrecks and corpses. Some day we shall have these mimics of Dame Nature content with nothing smaller than a drawing-room typhoon to carry off the foul air of an evening party; dowagers’ caps, young ladies’ scarfs, cards, pocket-handkerchiefs, will whirl upon their blast, and then they will be happy. Now their demands are modest, but they mean hurricanes rely upon it; we must not let ourselves be lulled into a false security. A fire, they say, is in English houses necessary during a large part of the year, is constant during that season when we are most closely shut up in our rooms. The fire, they say, is our most handy and most efficacious ventilator. Oh, yes, we know something about that: we know too well that the fire makes an ascending current, and that the cold air rushes from our doors and windows to the chimney, as from surrounding countries to the burning desert. We know that very well, because every such current is a draught; one cuts into our legs, one gnaws about our necks, and all our backs are cold. We are in the condition of a pious man in Fox’s “Martyrs,” about whom I used to read with childish reverence: that after a great deal of frying, during which he had not been turned by the Inquisition-Soyer, he lifted up his voice in verse: “This side enough is toasted; Then turn me, tyrant, and eat, And see whether raw or roasted I make the better meat.”