In the first place, the door opened straight on the fireplace, and as the front door--a frail thing of boards and sham stained glass--was about 6 feet away from it, the cold air rushed in the instant it was opened, and the heat of the fire flew mainly up the chimney, insuring that the rest of the room should be more like Siberia than any other spot. And in the second, the windows need not have been glazed at all so little did they keep out the outside atmosphere, notwithstanding the curtains which liberally adorned them, and which used to wave right out into the room at the very smallest approach of a breeze. When there was any amount of real wind, the room wasn’t a room any longer, it was one and the same thing as being in the garden, and anyone can easily understand how pleasant it was to come down to breakfast there with a roaring fire going up the chimney and a north or east wind playfully careering around the table, which, place it how we might, could never be in anything save a thorough draught. The first thing to do was to transpose the door, and make it open with its back to the grate. Then it had to be surrounded with the ever-useful ‘Slater’s patent’; and, as it opened into the room, a species of shelter was arranged behind it, while a curtain was hung on it--on one of the rods which open and shut with the door--and a pair of curtains put outside it. These hung straight down in good heavy folds when we were alone and there was not very much going in and out; and, as we had a ‘hatch’ into the kitchen, there never was much; but on ‘dinner-party nights’ the curtains were tied back, and so did not interfere with the coming and going, as a single undraped curtain always must interfere either more or less. Then attention was turned to the windows, and these were surrounded by more ‘Slater’s patent,’ which was liberally supplemented by putty, because the frames began to shrink away from the glass in a truly hideous manner, and, in consequence, there were two gaps, one there, and one where the frames were supposed to fit into the woodwork round the walls. The woodwork, in its turn, shrank from the brickwork, and the space had to be filled in with mortar and then painted over.