Sporting notions of present days and past

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IN FRESH WATER 177
to experience London baths, so am not now
competent to give an opinion, but, as a rule,
I used to find most baths very little to my taste,
though some vastly pleased other people. For
instance, I never came across what I call a
sensible Turkish bath. The miserable thing
was that a bath of this sort was ever introduced
under such a style or title, and that being so,
introduced to architects—oh ! those architects!
—the dim religious, gloomy, jealously-guarded-
from-the-sun, idea they have so ably amplified,
that the place to which you go to spend a
couple of hours or so is purposely darkened
till you cannot see to read big print in it.
That is to help the time pass quickly and
pleasantly, I presume. 'You want something
bright and cheerful, and are presented with a
stained-glass illuminated vault. Again, for
years architects thought a bit of glass between
the cooling room and the next, a sheet of glass
to divide the two, over the water of the plunge
must be correct. Two or three people, imagining
that what was glass was space, dived into
the invisible obstruction and cut themselves badly.
They also broke the glass. So the architects
fixed up thicker, and would have gone on thicken-
ing and constructively being guilty of maiming
with malice aforethought till they presented the
immovable vitreous body so often quoted.
But fortunately one of the mutilated plungers
brought an action for damages, and recovered
a jolly lot, too. Then the proprietors took the
architecture on their own hooks, and hung up
a bit of leather curtain which served all required
screening purposes, and did not lead to sub-
stantial and other painful damages. It always
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