nothing like a good fire after all.

I am thankful I am not in Paris now: I take down my French Pocket
Dictionary, published by Orr in 1850, and cannot find the French for
fire-place; I find firearms, fire-ball, fire-brand, fire-brush,
fire-cross, fire-lock, but no fire-place. Ah, here it is (fire-side,
_foyer_--substantive, masculine); but, to make quite sure, I turn to the
French-English, and I turn up _foyer_ there; and, here, I find it means,
"heat, tiring-room, green-room," and so on. Well, am I not right? there
is nothing like an English fire-place after all. The Germans are not
much better off than the French; the German porcelain stove, for
instance, standing in the middle of the room, like a monument, and nearly
filling it, is not for a second to be compared with a jolly English fire;
besides, it is very dangerous, and, when the flue gets stopped is, I was
going to write, as great a murderer as a medical man. Can I ever forget
how when I lived in the Kirchen Strasse of a far-famed and delightful
city, distant about 700 miles from where I write, how one morning I came
down-stairs to have my _fruhstuck_, and how, in the very middle of my
meal, I felt an uncomfortable sensation, as a gigantic Dane was reading
to me a memorial he was about to address to the British government? May
I tell the reader how at first I thought the document to which I have
referred might have something to do with it? Will he forgive me, if I
narrate how, at length, I gradually came to the conclusion that the cause
was in the atmosphere, which seemed to be splitting my head, and swelling
out my body to the point of bursting? can he imagine my deplorable
situation when I became insensible, and when I recovered consciousness
found that I had been poisoned by the fumes of charcoal, and that I
should then and there have shuffled off this mortal coil, had not my
Danish friend, for a wonder, lifted up his eyes from his precious
document, and, seeing me go off, thrown open the window, and, in a
polyglottic way, called for help? Truly, then, may I say, that, for
comfort, and for safety, and for warmth, if you can have it pretty nearly
all to yourself, and do one side thoroughly first before you roast the
other, there is nothing like an English fireplace in the world.

Woe is me! the present generation,--a generation most assuredly wise in
its own eyes, can never know what I, and others verging on forty,
know--the real luxury of an English