There is a wonderful disproportion in some hotels between the size of the furnishings and appliances and the results they are intended to secure. One of the best fitted-up, most city-like country hotels I know of, is the Devereux House in the city of Pandora, State of Cornucopia, but it is also keeping up one of the silliest pieces of extravagance in running seven fires in the kitchen for the cooking for generally forty and never more than fifty persons; the proprietor at the same time paying $6 a cord for wood and fifteen cents a bushel for charcoal and pinching and saving in all other ways to make both ends meet. As some readers will be puzzled to see how so many fires can exist in one small kitchen at once, we will give a diagram to show:

AA - 12-foot range, steam chest and hot water tank - fire sixteen hours a day.

B - 30-inch broiler - fire six hours a day.

C - No. 10 cook stove for batter cakes, private tea-pots, milk for toast, soft water in reservoir - fire eight hours a lay.

D - Charcoal toast range - fire su hours a day.

E - Two-story zinc oven dish-heatex with furnace - fire ten hours a day.

F - Carving table with furnace, for keeping rolls and corn bread warm and for dinner - fire ten hours a day.

G - Pastry cooks oven, zinc, with furnace - fire ten hours a day.

HH - Hot place for the cook.

I - Hard place for the hand that keeps up all the fires.

Jjj - Kitchen table; K meat block; L dead line for help.

The reason why they use so many fires to feed 40 or 50 people is that once upon a time, long years ago, the house used to contain 150 people and the fires were not too many; the trade went away but still, like the Aztecs, they keep up the sacred fires.

Now here is the other extreme:

A - One large cook stove.

B - Big broiling hearth and gridiron to same.

C - Hot water reservoir and tin dish-closet under.

D - Meat block.

E - Kitchen table.

F - Dead line for help.

T - Tea kettle.

We all like plenty of conveniences, a place for everything, and I am not going to make an argument against plenty of range room. There must be a medium, however, somewhere between these two pictures. This stove is to serve for some number unknown except that it will never exceed fifty. How well I remember the splendid and plentiful dinners that used to be cooked for as many as from 150 to 300 people on those little up-river steamboats at this very low-water time of year, on light six-foot ranges that we could almost carry around. More than half had to be done by steaming, because the ovens were so small. Half-a-dozen entrees would be well cooked over the ash-pan full of coals with the gridiron upon them. Right now, there is the City of Fremont of the Lake Superior line setting a magnificent table for large numbers, though her kitchen (caboose) is little more than a cupboard; the range one of the smallest; the pastry room positively too small for a man to stretch his arms to pull off a coat. And still they prepare all sorts of delicacies in it. "There is more in the man than there is in the land."