16

DOMESTIC MANNEBS OF THE FBUSSIANS.

anything liko bright, are usually of the foxy complexionpeculiar to the irons that stand in the water beside a smitli'sforge; whilst the stoves, together with the iron tubing thatserves for chimney, are generally as dingy-looking as thetops of old Wellington boots.

The heating apparatus which Stands in the room thatwo are now writing in is about as elegant in design as wouldbc three mignonette-boxes supported one above another uponflower-pots. This is all in cast-iron of the rudest possibleworkmanship, and from the back of it there rises about ayard and a half of chimney like a gas-pipe.

Such is the fireside of an Englishman in Rhineland!

Still the most pernicious effects of these domestic kilnsremain to be told. Open chimneys (f'Kammer ") are neces-sarily precluded in Deutschland by the use of chemical furnacesfor grates; and the Prussians, believing that the Kamin servesonly to carry off the smoke from the fire, have substituted a slipof iron-tubing in its stead. But in " uneducated England"—to adopt a favourite German phrase — almost every labourer'swife knows that a chimney is necessary for the due Ventilationof either sitting or sleeping-rooms, whilst any one in the hastacquainted with sanitary phenomena is well aware, that forthe preservation of life and health, it is as recpiisite thereshould be some apparatus in every Chamber for conductingaway the products of combustion in the body, as for gettingrid of the fumes of burning carbon in the stove,— the breathand transpiration of the skin being merely transparent smoke,and as poisonous to inhale even as the "choke-damp" of ourcoal-mines, with which, indeed, it is chemically identical.

The " educated" Prussians, on the other hand, are eitherignorant of simple facts like these, that are taught daily at ourMechanics' Institutes, or eise they are so fond of living amid