t the exercise that he needed; more probably because of the
draughts. My friend's wife, who was very clever with her needle, made
for the swallow a little jacket of red flannel, and sought to divert
his mind by teaching him to perform a few simple tricks. For a while he
seemed to regain his spirits. But presently he moped more than ever,
crouching nearer than ever to the fire, and, sidelong, blinking dim
weak reproaches at his disappointed master and mistress. One swallow,
as the adage truly says, does not make a summer. So this one's mistress
hurriedly made for him a little overcoat of sealskin, wearing which, in
a muffled cage, he was personally conducted by his master straight
through to Sicily. There he was nursed back to health, and liberated on
a sunny plain. He never returned to his English home; but the nest he
built under the mantelpiece is still preserved in case he should come
at last.

When the sun's rays slant down upon your grate, then the fire blanches
and blenches, cowers, crumbles, and collapses. It cannot compete with
its archetype. It cannot suffice a sun-steeped swallow, or ripen a
plum, or parch the carpet. Yet, in its modest way, it is to your room
what the sun is to the world; and where, during the greater part of the
year, would you be without it? I do not wonder that the poor, when they
have to choose between fuel and food, choose fuel. Food nourishes the
body; but fuel, warming the body, warms the soul too. I do not wonder
that the hearth has been regarded from time immemorial as the centre,
and used as the symbol, of the home. I like the social tradition that
we must not poke a fire in a friend's drawing-room unless our
friendship dates back full seven years. It rests evidently, this
tradition, on the sentiment that a fire is a thing sacred to the
members of the household in which it burns. I dare say the fender has a
meaning, as well as a use, and is as the rail round an altar. In 'The
New Utopia' these hearths will all have been rased, of course, as
demoralising relics of an age when people went in for privacy and were
not always thinking exclusively about the State. Such heat as may be
needed to prevent us from catching colds (whereby our vitality would be
lowered, and our usefulness to the State impaired) will be supplied
through hot-water pipes (white-enamelled), the supply being strictly
regulated from the municipal water-works. Or has Mr. Wells arranged
that the sun shall always be shin