The Duke of Wellington used to say that the victory at Waterloo was won on the playing- fields at Eton.

That is the best people where the boys are manly and where the men have a good deal of the boy in them.
Perhaps all my younger readers do not know how much that makes up, not only the luxury, but the comfort of life, has first come in within the memory of persons now living.

The household life of my childhood was not much better in those respects than that of a well-to-do Roman or Greek.

It had not improved a great deal for two thousand years.

There were no house- warming furnaces, and stoves were almost unknown.