“And behold, there is nurra goaks in the whole kingdom (Scotland), nor anything for pore servants, but a barrel with a pair of tongs thrown across, and all the chairs of the family are emptied into this here barrel once a day; and at ten o’clock at night the whole cargo is flung out of a back windere that looks into some street or lane, and the maid calls, ‘Gardy loo!’ to the passengers, which signifies, ‘Lord have mercy upon you!’ and this is done every night in every house in Hadinborough.”—(“Humphrey Clinker,” Tobias Smollett, edition of London, 1872, p. 542.) The above seems to have been a French expression,—“Gare de l’eau.” “The cry of all the South was that the public offices, the army, the navy, were filled with high-cheeked Drummonds and Erskines and McGillvrays.... All the old jokes on hills without trees, girls without stockings, men eating the food of horses, pails emptied from the fourteenth story, were pointed against these lucky adventurers.”—(T. B. Macaulay, “The Earl of Chatham,” American edition, Appleton and Co., New York, 1874, p. 720.) The addition of privies to the homes of the gentry would appear to have been an innovation in the time of Queen Elizabeth, else there would not have been so much comment made upon the action of Sir John Harington, her distant cousin, who erected one as a fitting convenience to his new house, near Bath, and published a very Rabelaisian volume upon the subject in London in 1596. The title of the book, being quite long,—“A Discourse on a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax,”—will in subsequent citations be given simply as Harington’s “Ajax.” From the description of the latrine in question there is no doubt that Harington anticipated nearly all the mechanism of modern days. Richard III. is represented as having been seated in a latrine, “sitting on a draught,” when he was “devising with Terril how to have his nephews privily murdered.”—(Harington, “Ajax,” p. 46.) There is little reason to doubt that all houses in England, and all Continental Europe as well, were provided with receptacles for urine in the bed-chambers, even if no regular latrines existed outside of the monasteries and other community-houses. Dr. Robert Fletcher, U. S. Army, who has contributed the following, is of the opinion that these conveniences were provided for ladies only, and submits the following passages in support of his conclusions:— “Hamjo, in the ‘Wanderer,’ part 2, by Sir Thomas Killigrew, describing to Senilia the probable manners of a rude husband, says that, on retiring to bed, ‘the gyant stretches himself, yawns, and sighs a belch or two, stales in your pot, farts as loud as a musket for a jest,’” etc. In Douce’s “Illustrations of Shakspeare” is a curious print of a bishop blessing a newly married pair in the bridal bed; on the lady’s side a chamber-pot is ostentatiously displayed.