To make it perfect, the summer should be very hot and the house in which you live very cool. You should keep it cool by keeping it dark--just dark enough not to prevent you from reading a charming old book as you lie on the sofa in one of the lighter rooms. Your costume as you lie on the sofa and wander about from chamber to chamber should be of the most imponderable; in fact, you should have on almost no clothes at all. To increase the comfort of your undressedness you must have no fellow-inmates but the servants, who remain below stairs and adapt themselves to the temperature as best they can. They are free, of course, to sit in the cellar. And then you must have several other resources--resources which, if you are an American, you may be pardoned for believing to be most easily secured in the case of your trying your experiment in your native land. The carpets must all have been taken up and the floors covered with straw matting in pale, tender colors. There must be an everlasting gush of the coldest water into a bath big enough for you, if the fancy takes you, to drown yourself in. You must have plenty of peaches and pears, of grapes and melons. You must commit unseen excesses in the consumption of ice-cream. You must sit in the evening on a balcony and, looking up and down the empty street, see here and there in other balconies the gleam of a white robe in the darkness. These harmless conditions have not been combined in my own metropolitan sojourn, and I have received an impression that in London it would be rather difficult for a person not having the command of a good deal of powerful machinery to find them united. English summer weather is rarely hot enough to make it necessary to darken one's house and disrobe. The present year has indeed in this respect been "exceptional," as any year is, for that matter, that one spends anywhere. But the manners of the people are, to American eyes, a sufficient indication that at the best (or the worst) the highest flights of the thermometer in the British Islands are not particularly startling. People live with closed windows in August, very much as they do in January, and there is to the eye no appreciable difference in the character of their apparel. A "bath" in England, for the most part all the year round, means a little portable tin tub and a sponge. Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are not a more obvious ornament of the market at mid-summer than at Christmas. This matter of peaches and melons, by the way, offers one of the best examples of that fact to which a foreign commentator on English manners finds himself constantly recurring, and to which he grows at last almost ashamed of alluding--the fact that the beauty and luxury of the country--that elaborate system known and revered all over the world as "English comfort"--is a distinctly limited and restricted, an essentially private, affair. I am not one of those irreverent strangers