Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
Coming to Godalming on Friday, where business kept us that night, we had
to experience at the inn the want of our American fire-place. A large
and long room to sit in, with a miserable thing called a screen to keep
the wind from our backs, with a smoke in the room half an hour after the
fire was lighted, we, consuming a full bushel of coals in order to keep
us warm, were not half so well off as we should have been in the same
room, and without any screen, and with two gallons of coals, if we had
our American fire-place. I gave the landlord my advice upon the subject,
and he said he would go and look at the fire-place at Mr. Knowles's.
That was precisely one of those rooms which stand in absolute need of
such a fire-place. It is, I should think, five-and-thirty, or forty feet
long, and pretty nearly twenty feet wide. I could sooner dine with a
labouring man upon his allowance of bread, such as I have mentioned
above, than I would, in winter time, dine in that room upon turbot and
sirloin of beef. An American fire-place, with a good fire in it, would
make every part of that room pleasant to dine in in the coldest day in
winter. I saw a public-house drinking-room, where the owner has tortured
his invention to get a little warmth for his guests, where he fetches
his coals in a waggon from a distance of twenty miles or thereabouts,
and where he consumes these coals by the bushel, to effect that which he
cannot effect at all, and which he might effect completely with about a
fourth part of the coals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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