almost contented. But one day a
malignant woman called, and looked at this device through her gilt
eye-glasses, while she secretly groped in the dark of her mind for an
unpleasant thing to say. Then suddenly she remarked, "Why not put your
coal in a bassinette? Or keep it _all_ on the floor?" Euphemia's face
fell. The thing was undeniably very like a cradle, in the light of this
suggestion; the coal certainly did seem a little out of place there; and
besides, if there were more than three or four lumps they had a way of
tumbling over the edge upon the carpet when the fire was replenished.
The tender shoot of Euphemia's satisfaction suddenly withered and died.

So the struggle has gone on. Sometimes it has been a wrought iron tripod
with a subtle tendency to upset in certain directions; sometimes a
coal-box; once even the noisy old coal-box of japanned tin, making more
noise than a Salvation Army service, and strangely decorated with "art"
enamels, had a turn. At present Euphemia is enduring a walnut "casket,"
that since its first week of office has displayed an increasing
indisposition to shut. But things cannot stay like this. The worry and
anxiety and vexation, Euphemia declares, are making her old before her
time. A delicate woman should not be left alone to struggle against
brazen monsters. A closed gas stove is happily impossible, but the
husband of the household is threatened with one of those beastly sham
fires, wherein gas jets flare among firebrick--a mechanical fire without
vitality or variety, that never dances nor crackles nor blazes, a
monotonous horror, a fire you cannot poke. That is what it will
certainly come to if the problem remains unsolved.

BAGARROW

Frankly, I detest this Bagarrow. Yet it is quite generally conceded that
Bagarrow is a very well-meaning fellow. But the trouble is to understand
him. To do that I have been at some pains, and yet I am still a mere
theorist. An anthropometric estimate of the man fails to reveal any
reason for the distinction of my aversion. He is of passable height,
breadth, and density, and, save for a certain complacency of expression,
I find no salient objection in his face. He has bluish eyes and a
whitish skin, and average-coloured hair--none of them distinctly
indictable possessions. It is something in his interior and unseen
mechanism, I think, that must be wrong; some internal lesion that finds
expression in his acts.

His mental operations, indeed