Europe and elsewhere, by Mark Twain [pseud.] [with an appreciation by Brander Matthews and an introduction by Albert Bigelow Paine]

EUROPE AND ELSEWHERE

a German stove to heat one's room, and an open
wood fire to make it cheerful; then have furnaceheat in the halls. We could easily find some way
to make the German stove beautiful, and that is all
it needs at present. Still, even as it is to-day, it is
lovely, it is a darling, compared with any "radiator"
that has yet been intruded upon the world. That
odious gilded skeleton! It makes all places ugly that
it inhabits-just by contagion.
It is certainly strange that useful customs and
devices do not spread from country to country with
more facility and promptness than they do. You
step across the German border almost anywhere, and
suddenly the German stove has disappeared. In
Italy you find a foolish and ineffectual modification
of it, in Paris you find an unprepossessing "adaptation" of our base-burner on a reduced pattern.
Fifteen years ago Paris had a cheap and cunning
little fire kindler consisting of a pine shaving, curled
as it came from the carpenter's plane, and gummed
over with an inflammable substance which would
burn several minutes and set fire to the most obdurate wood. It was cheap and handy, but no
stranger carried the idea home with him. Paris has
another swift and victorious kindler, now, in the
form of a small black cake made of I don't know
what; but you shove it under the wood and touch a
match to it and your fire is made. No one will think
to carry that device to America, or elsewhere. In
America we prefer to kindle the fire with the kerosene can and chance the inquest. I have been in a
multitude of places where pine cones were abundant,
178