The water with the Rutherford B. Hayes administration.
I was given to understand that this was a fair sample of the
average residential London bathroom - though the newer apartment
houses that are going up have better ones, they told me.
In English country houses the dearth of bathing appliances must
be even more dearthful. I ran through the columns of the leading
English fashion journal and read the descriptions of the large
country places that were there offered for sale or lease. In many
instances the advertisements were accompanied by photographic
reproductions in half tone showing magnificent old places, with
Queen Anne fronts and Tudor towers and Elizabethan entails and
Georgian mortgages, and what not.
Seeing these views I could conjure up visions of rooks cawing in
the elms; of young curates in flat hats imbibing tea on green
lawns; of housekeepers named Meadows or Fleming, in rustling black
silk; of old Giles - fifty years, man and boy, on the place - wearing
a smock frock and leaning on a pitchfork, with a wisp of hay caught
in the tines, lamenting that the 'All 'asn't been the same, zur,
since the young marster was killed ridin' to 'ounds; and then
pensively wiping his eyes on a stray strand of the hay.
With no great stretch of the imagination I could picture a gouty,
morose old lord with a secret sorrow and a brandy breath; I could
picture a profligate heir going deeper and deeper in debt, but
refusing to the bitter end to put the ax to the roots of the
ancestral oaks. I could imagine these parties readily, because I
had frequently read about both of them in the standard English
novels; and I had seen them depicted in all the orthodox English
dramas I ever patronized. But I did not notice in the appended
descriptions any extended notice of heating arrangements; most of
the advertisements seemed to slur over that point altogether.
And, as regards bathing facilities in their relation to the
capacities of these country places, I quote at random from the
figures given: Eighteen rooms and one bath; sixteen rooms and two
baths; fourteen rooms and one bath; twenty-one rooms and two baths;
eleven rooms and one bath; thirty-four rooms and two baths.
Remember that by rooms bedrooms were meant; the reception rooms
and parlors and dining halls and offices, and the like, were listed
separately.
I asked a well-informed Englishman how he could reconcile this
discrepancy between bedrooms and bathrooms with the current belief
that the English had a practical monopoly of the habit of bathing.
After considering the proposition at some length he said I should
understand there was a difference in England between taking a bath
and taking a tub - that, though an Englishman might not be particularly
addicted to a bath, he must have his tub every morning.
