&rf J*Y* ^ /? 
 
 1 he Thsfory or 
 
 u^ tX 
 
 And Its Future 
 
 Robert Ellis Thompson 
 
THE HISTORY OF 
 
 THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 AND ITS FUTURE 
 
THE HISTORY OF 
 
 THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 AND ITS FUTURE 
 
 BY 
 ROBERT ELLIS THOMPSON, LL.D. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON 
 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 
 
 1914 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHED MAY, 
 
 PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 
 
 AT THE -WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A. 
 
To 
 WILLIAM LISETER AUSTIN 
 
 IN GRATEFUL RECOGNITION OF MUCH KINDNESS 
 
 865676 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 I. THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 17 
 
 II. FROM HALL TO HOUSE 45 
 
 III. THE TOWN-HOUSE 72 
 
 IV. THE LATER TOWN-HOUSE 83 
 
 V. THE HOUSE OF TO-DAY 105 
 
 VI. THE HOUSE THAT is TO BE: ITS ORGANIZATION . 121 
 VII. THE HOUSE THAT is TO BE: ITS EQUIPMENT . . . 140 
 
 VIII. THE STREETS OF THE FUTURE 153 
 
 IX. CONCLUSION . 163 
 
INTRODUCTION. ..--.;, 
 
 SOME eighty years ago a young Lutheran 
 clergyman, the Rev. Eilert Sundt, was giv- 
 ing religious instructions to a class of 
 prisoners in the House of Correction at 
 Christiania in Norway. His attention was 
 drawn to one member of the class, who was 
 a marked contrast to the tall, fair-haired and 
 blue-eyed Norsemen. This man was of 
 short stature, with dark hair and black eyes. 
 He was very forward in answering the ques- 
 tions Mr. Sundt put to the class, but he 
 generally answered them wrongly. When 
 the instruction was finished the young chap- 
 lain took the man apart, and asked him who 
 and what he was. He found that this was 
 one of the Fante-folk, as the Norwegians 
 
 call the Gypsies; and he learned from him 
 
 9 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 many particulars not always authentic 
 as to tile habits and beliefs of his people. 
 
 The matter interested Mr. Sundt so much 
 that he sent a memoir to the government of 
 the country, telling what the man had told 
 him of the Fante-folk, their numbers and 
 their mode of life, and suggesting that an 
 effort be made to induce them to give up 
 their nomadic habits, and to settle down as 
 orderly and industrious citizens. The 
 authorities in Christiania accepted the sug- 
 gestion, and commissioned Mr. Sundt him- 
 self to travel through Norway, and to meet 
 these wanderers with the offer of help in 
 casting off their vagabondage, and finding 
 permanent homes. 1 
 
 In the main purpose of his tour through 
 
 1 Beretning om Fante- eller Landstrygerfolket i Norge. 
 Bidrag til Kundskab om de laveste Samfundsvorholde. 
 Christiania: 1850; Andet Oplag. Pp. vi, 394. Christiania: 
 1852. Fortsat Beretning om Fante-Folket. Christiania: 
 1859. The work is summarized in Vagabundenthum und 
 Wanderleben in Norwegen. Von A. Etzel. Berlin: 1870. 
 
 10 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Norway, Mr. Sundt had no great success. 
 The habitual life of the Gypsies had too 
 many attractions for them to admit of his 
 getting the hearing he hoped. But he was 
 what Carlyle calls " a credible person with 
 eyes," and he managed to learn a great deal 
 about the Norse- folk themselves. For one 
 thing, he noticed that on a single farm 
 might be found not only one farmhouse, 
 but two, three, four, and in one case as many 
 as eight. Each of these seemed to represent 
 a stage in the development of the country- 
 house, and each in its turn had been dis- 
 carded as a home, but retained as a store- 
 house for the crops, even hay. By such 
 study as he could make of these successions 
 of houses, he got light on the development 
 of the house, not of Norway alone, but of 
 northern Europe generally. 2 
 
 2 Bygningsskikken i Norge. Af Eilert Sundt. Christiania: 
 1863. 
 
 11 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The farm-houses of Norway, like its old 
 churches, were constructed of pine-wood, a 
 material which lasts as long as any other 
 when well taken care of and protected from 
 the weather by paint. There are houses 
 still standing, which were in use when that 
 country was Christianized by Us two kings 
 Olaf, early in the eleventh century. Even 
 in America there are such houses, which are 
 still inhabited after a quarter of a millen- 
 nium. And the early firing arrangements 
 exposed houses to conflagration much less 
 than in later days, and far less than in the 
 cities at all times. 
 
 Besides these monuments of domestic 
 architecture, there is what I may call a run- 
 ning commentary on them in the saga litera- 
 ture of the Scandinavian north, which 
 abounds in references to household ways. 
 Text and commentary go together for the 
 student of domestic antiquities in those 
 
 12 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 northern lands. Prof. Troels Lund of the 
 University of Copenhagen has made a close 
 study of both, and has enlarged our knowl- 
 edge of them by literary and historical in- 
 vestigations, always acknowledging his 
 obligations to his predecessors in this field. 
 In fact Mr. Sundt's " Building Fashions in 
 Norway," and Prof. Lund's " Every-day 
 Life in the Scandinavian North " 3 are 
 memorable books, through the light they 
 have cast on a familiar and naturally 
 interesting branch of human history. 
 
 We have in English antiquarian treatises 
 on houses, of a descriptive character, and 
 often of much interest. But I know of none 
 of them that trace the genetic development 
 of the house from its beginnings to the 
 present time. This I have attempted in this 
 short history. 
 
 *Das Tagliche Leben in Skandinavien wahrend des 
 Sechszehnten Jahrhunderts. Von Troels Lund. Kopen- 
 bagen: 1882. 
 
 13 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I must caution my readers against a too 
 literal construction of my statements. It 
 is not meant that the course of development 
 I have traced is that which was followed with 
 mechanical regularity in every case. Houses 
 are the work of men, not of mere mechanical 
 forces. Being men, they sought to adjust 
 their domestic surroundings to their own 
 tastes and preferences. In doing so, how- 
 ever, they also gave great scope to social 
 tradition. Partly to avoid the trouble in- 
 volved in getting anything done out of the 
 common, and partly to avoid social criti- 
 cism, which is nowhere so keen as among 
 simple people, they usually built as their 
 neighbors did. But in many cases they 
 showed independence of taste and judg- 
 ment in the construction, arrangement and 
 adornment of their houses. No row of 
 houses in an old mediaeval town would ex- 
 hibit such a wearisome uniformity as is to 
 
 14 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 be found even in the wealthier parts of 
 modern cities. Both the house-owner, for 
 whom the work was done, and the workmen 
 engaged in its erection, showed far more 
 independence in design than is to be found 
 in modern men of either class. It was an 
 age of living and original architecture, 
 while modern building, except among the 
 Jain sect in India, as Mr. Ferguson points 
 out, is lifeless arid imitative. 
 
 Let me not, however, be charged with 
 representing a degree of uniformity in the 
 development of the house, which did not 
 exist in fact. It is impossible to embody in 
 any story the amount of variety which 
 actually exists in human affairs. As Carlyle 
 says, narrative is linear, but life is solid, 
 and can be represented but imperfectly in 
 literature. What I have aimed at is the 
 selection of what is typical and normal out 
 of a boundless variety of facts. 
 
 15 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 It is my hope that my small book will 
 make to every reader more intelligible, and 
 therefore more interesting, the home he lives 
 in; and that from what he is told here of the 
 reform in the past, he may judge more justly 
 of what are the reforms demanded by the 
 present and the future. 
 
THE HISTORY OF 
 
 THE DWELLING HOUSE 
 
 AND ITS FUTURE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 MR. MACMASTER, in his " History of the 
 American People," says of the house which 
 President Jefferson built for himself at 
 Monticello, that " of all the houses built of 
 man, none more surely was so much a part 
 of the owner. What the shell is to the tor- 
 toise, all that was Monticello to Jefferson. 
 The structure had grown with his growth, 
 and bore all the marks of his individuality." 
 
 In a broad sense, though perhaps in a less 
 striking degree, this is what every type of 
 house has been to the group which lived in it. 
 As the shell-fish excretes its shell, the family 
 
 2 1? 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 has excreted, as it were, the home suitable 
 to its needs and expressive of its character. 
 The need of a home of some sort for the 
 shelter and protection of the child must have 
 been felt very early. Sociologists are only 
 now awakening to the importance of the 
 child as a motive to the great process we call 
 civilization, and to the fact that the love of 
 father and mother for child antedated the 
 love of husband and wife. For the child's 
 sake were undertaken the labors by which 
 men emerged from the savage's dependence 
 upon what nature furnished without other 
 toil than that of gathering her gifts. It was 
 for the child's sake that the field was cleared 
 of weeds, fenced and tilled, and the plants 
 whose seeds or roots were most suitable for 
 human food were sought and encouraged. 
 For the child's sake softer clothing than the 
 skins of wild beasts was obtained. And for 
 
 the child's sake a home was devised to pro- 
 is 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 tect it against the heat of summer and the 
 cold of winter. Its little hand has held the 
 marshal's baton in the great march of 
 human progress. 
 
 Of the house devised for the child's safety 
 there are three principal types. These are 
 the tree-house, the cave-house, and the hall. 
 
 1. The tree-house belongs to the tropics, 
 where it still survives in the Philippine 
 Islands and some other countries of south- 
 eastern Asia. 
 
 The tree plays a very notable part in the 
 sacred traditions, the worship and the econo- 
 mies of primitive mankind. The account of 
 Eden, and of the life of the early patriarchs, 
 in the Hebrew records reflects this. To 
 savage man the tree was a living thing and 
 the first object he found in that upward 
 gaze, by which he searched for the Power 
 which protected and controlled his life. It 
 fed, clothed, and sheltered him. In its 
 
 19 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 branches he found a refuge from floods, wild 
 beasts, and noxious insects. He made it his 
 home by erecting a scaffold within its 
 branches, and fashioned its leaves into a 
 thatched roof to keep off sun and rain. Here 
 he found his safety and that of his family, 
 in that early age when he fled before the wild 
 beasts, because he had not yet devised the 
 weapons which were to make them fly be- 
 fore him. 
 
 Mr. Henry Savage-Landor, in his valu- 
 able book of travels in the Philippines, shows 
 us the tree-house as still used by some of the 
 natives of that archipelago. At one point 
 n his journey he was expecting to come 
 upon a native village, but at first could see 
 no sign of it. Then he observed a rough 
 ladder leaning against a tall tree. Climbing 
 it, he came to a sort of bridge-path from 
 tree to tree, and on following this he came 
 upon the village. 
 
 20 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 In another book on the islands of south- 
 eastern Asia Mr. Savage-Landor describes 
 the Manobos of Mindanao, one of the 
 largest tribes of that island, as " tree-dwell- 
 ing," adding that their houses " could be 
 seen on tree-tops of immense height, some 
 at an elevation of over fifty feet above the 
 ground. . . . Their principal reason for the 
 high location of their houses is that they 
 may be protected against enemies." In an- 
 other part of the Philippine group he found 
 houses " constructed on the tops of trees, 
 the highest branches having been cut to a 
 level, so as to form supports on which to build 
 these inaccessible houses. One house on the 
 river bank was on piles eighteen feet high." 
 
 In Central Africa, in districts where 
 wild beasts abound, the natives live in huts 
 like gigantic beehives, fixed among the 
 branches of the huge baobab tree, sometimes 
 
 thirty families in one tree. 
 
 21 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 The passage from the perch in the tree 
 to the ground was gradual. In Burmah, the 
 Philippines and other parts of southeastern 
 Asia the house often occupies a lofty plat- 
 form, and is accessible only by a ladder. 
 And the association of the tree with the 
 house still lingered in the ground-built house. 
 The house of Ulysses in Ithaca was built 
 round a sacred olive, whose trunk its owner 
 had carved into a bed, so that Penelope 
 identified her husband by suggesting that his 
 bed had been moved, and evoking his denial 
 of the possibility of this. 
 
 Recent excavations show us that the ear- 
 liest Greek houses were built of wood, roofed 
 with leaves, and circular in form, thus testify- 
 ing to their arboreal descent. To enlarge 
 the space the circle afterwards was made an 
 oval, with posts of wood to hold up the roof. 
 Later still the oval either became a rectangle, 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 or rectangular at one end while retaining 
 the curves at the other, the origin of the 
 apse in later buildings. The interior was 
 one large room (megarion), with the hearth 
 in the centre, and the door on the south side 
 (not on the west as in the northern hall), 
 and sometimes opening into an anteroom or 
 porch. The division into rooms came later. 
 There was nothing distinguished about the 
 domestic architecture of early Greece. Even 
 Athens before the Persian War was made 
 up of narrow streets, lined with closely built 
 houses of wood and stone, with a projecting 
 upper story, and sometimes gardens in front. 
 These were the homes of the women and 
 children rather than of the men, who spent 
 their days in public, and did not receive 
 guests in their houses. 4 
 
 The migrants to northern latitude carried 
 
 4 See the article "Haus" in Pauly-Wissowa, new edition. 
 23 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 with them memories of the connection of the 
 tree with the house. In some of the great 
 halls of the Norse chieftains, which were 
 at times two hundred feet long and sixty 
 wide, a great tree grew in the midst. Wil- 
 liam Morris, in his " Sigurd the Volsung," 
 describes the " branstock " which grew in 
 the Hall of the Volsung king: 
 
 So therein withal was a marvel and a glorious thing 
 
 to see, 
 For amidst of its midmost hall-floor sprang up a 
 
 mighty tree, 
 That reared its blessings roofward, and wreathed 
 
 the roof-tree dear 
 With the glory of the summer and the garland of 
 
 the year. . . . 
 
 When men tell of Volsung, they call that war- 
 duke's tree 
 That crowned stem, the Branstock; and so was it 
 
 told to me. 
 So there was the throne of the Volsung beneath 
 
 its blossoming bower, 
 But high o'er the roof-crest red it rose 'twixt 
 
 tower and tower, 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 And therein were the wild hawks dwelling, abiding 
 
 the dole of their lord; 
 And they wailed high over the wine, and laughed 
 
 to the waking sword. 
 
 Then at the ill-fated wedding of the Vol- 
 sung maiden to the king of the Goths, Odin 
 appears 
 
 Then into the Volsung dwelling a mighty man 
 
 there strode, 
 One-eyed and seeming ancient, yet bright his 
 
 visage glowed: 
 Cloud-blue was the hood upon him, and his kirtle 
 
 gleaming'-grey . . . 
 So strode he to the Branstock nor greeted any 
 
 lord, 
 But forth from his cloudiy raiment he drew a 
 
 gleaming sword, 
 And smote it deep in the tree-bole, and the wild 
 
 hawks overhead 
 Laughed 'neath the naked heaven as at last he 
 
 spake and said, 
 " Earls of the Goths, and Volsungs, abide rs on 
 
 the earth, 
 Lo there amid the Branstock a blade of plenteous 
 
 worth! . . . 
 
 25 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 Now let the man among you whose heart and hand 
 
 may shift 
 To pluck it from the oakwood, e'en take it for 
 
 my gift." 
 
 2. In prehistoric times the people of at 
 least the north of Europe were cave-dwellers, 
 or troglodytes. An opening in the hillside, 
 enlarged and strengthened, if not con- 
 structed, by human labor and skill, gave 
 safety and shelter on the simplest terms. In 
 such caves as those of the Neanderthal and 
 Cro-Magnon we find the oldest human re- 
 mains of men contemporary with the Mam- 
 moth. Nor has this type of home passed 
 away even yet. Mr. Kinglake, in his 
 " Eothen," mentions finding it in the Cau- 
 casus. John Bellows found others inhabited 
 by Armenians on the frontier of Persia. In 
 Mexico and some of the adjacent parts of 
 America, there are many remains of cave- 
 dwellings, and some groups who still make 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 their home " in the clefts of the rock," as 
 Jeremiah says of the Edomites (xlix, 16). 
 In the French valley of the Loire there has 
 been a sort of reversion to the troglodyte 
 type. Some twojnillions of the people now 
 make their homes in the caves which have 
 been excavated in quarrying for building- 
 stone. These are said to be cool in summer 
 and warm in winter, and free from damp- 
 ness. The entrances are wreathed with 
 flowering vines. 
 
 Entered, lighted and ventilated through 
 its mouth, the cave-house must have been 
 smoky, drafty and damp. But it combined 
 the best comfort that men knew with com- 
 parative safety. So our fathers made the 
 best of it. 
 
 It probably was not its discomfort, but 
 the scarcity of caves, which led to a change. 
 When a migration brought a people into an 
 open country, where there were no hillsides 
 
 27' 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 to furnish caves, or when the available sup- 
 ply of caves ran short of the numbers of the 
 community, the next step was to construct 
 artificial caves. The more conservative peo- 
 ples did this by excavating a cave under- 
 ground, and making it accessible by ladders. 
 Xenophon, in his " Anabasis," describes the 
 cave dwellings of this sort which he found in 
 Armenia, where indeed they still exist. In 
 the Aleutian Islands of Alaska the primitive 
 cave is perpetuated by underground homes 
 of this type. 
 
 3. The preference for a cave constructed 
 above ground may be said to have led to the 
 Hall, and thus to the modern house. 
 
 Traces of the influence of the cave as a 
 model may be seen in its construction. The 
 Hall stood east and west, and the door was 
 placed in the western end, as it had been 
 observed that caves with a western exposure 
 were the more comfortable, giving less access 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 to cold winds. 5 The roof was pitched high 
 by lofty gables, so as to allow room for the 
 smoke to rise out of contact with human 
 eyes, as it seldom could have done in the 
 cave. The walls were constructed with a 
 frame-work of wood, filled with kneaded 
 clay; though some halls were of wood 
 throughout. The roof was made by placing 
 layers of birch-bark over the beams which 
 ran up to the roof-tree, and covering this 
 with sods, which were cut so thick that 
 the grass and the weeds went on growing. 
 As the side walls were very low, it was possi- 
 ble for goats, sheep and even pigs to climb 
 upon the roof and graze over it. As the lines 
 of the building were irregular, any one who 
 
 5 May not this have had as much to do with the 
 " orientation of the churches," as any idea of facing toward 
 Jerusalem? Even in those early times they knew enough 
 of geography to be aware that a building standing east 
 and west in a northern latitude was not facing toward the 
 Holy City. The pagan temples also stood east and west, 
 With their entrances in the western end. 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 approached it from the north or the south 
 might have mistaken it for a mound of 
 grass-grown earth, turned to grazing uses. 
 
 The Hall was entered through an opening 
 in the western gable, which looked more like 
 a window- space than a doorway. The lintel 
 was brought so low, and the threshold was 
 raised so high, that no one could enter with- 
 out both stooping his head so low and lift- 
 ing his foot so high, that he could be de- 
 spatched if he came as an enemy. The vul- 
 nerable point of the building was not the 
 door, but the window (or wind's eye), an 
 opening in the centre of the roof. From that 
 point the master of the house sometimes was 
 killed by arrow or javelin as he sat at his 
 fireside. So in times of especial danger, an 
 armed man was posted on a small platform 
 under that opening. 
 
 Like its predecessor the cave-house, the 
 Hdll at first was one great room, undivided 
 
 30 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 by partition-walls or floors into rooms or 
 stories. Its furniture was simple, and 
 usually made up not of movables, but of 
 fixtures. The principal piece was the " long 
 seat," which ran close to the walls on the 
 north and south sides, and sometimes across 
 the eastern gable. It was fastened firmly to 
 the wall and the floor, and the long but 
 narrow table in front of it sometimes was 
 mounted on trestles, and removable when 
 not in use; but in others was fastened to 
 pillars driven into the ground. When the 
 Grettir-Saga would give us an impression 
 of the violence of the struggle between 
 Grettir and the Vampire, it tells us that the 
 furniture was torn from its fastenings and 
 flung around the Hall. 
 
 The middle of the long seat was raised 
 above the level of the rest, and was called 
 the High Seat. It was reserved for the 
 master of the Hall and his wife, while a 
 
 31 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 second High Seat opposite to it was occu- 
 pied by distinguished guests, if such were 
 present. 6 
 
 This was the place of greatest comfort, 
 as being opposite the fire, which was placed 
 in the centre of the Hall on flat stones, and 
 served to light and warm the Hall, as well 
 as to cook the food. The smoke made its 
 way to the roof, and some of it passed out 
 through the window, but most of it settled 
 on the beams and balks as soot, especially 
 when in bad weather the window was closed 
 with a slightly transparent lid. In damp 
 weather it absorbed so much moisture that 
 its weight overcame its adhesion, and it 
 came down in showers. Although unpleas- 
 ant, this sprinkling of the Hall was not un- 
 desirable, as it served as an antiseptic to 
 
 'In the pagan temples, which were built very much like 
 the Halls, the high seat was the place of the three chief 
 gods of the Norse mythology Odin, Thor and Frey. In 
 Norway Odin generally occupied the central place, as the 
 chief. In Iceland Thor. 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 render harmless the foulness of the floor, 
 which was covered with straw or rushes. In 
 these the dogs lay and gnawed the bones 
 flung to them. In this on cold nights were 
 quartered the chickens and the four-legged 
 youth of the barnyard, as there were no out- 
 buildings to shelter them. And when the 
 straw rushes grew too foul for endurance, 
 they brought a fresh supply, and spread 
 this over the old. 
 
 The occupants of the Hall were not the 
 natural family father, mother, children, 
 and possibly servants which we think of as 
 making up a household. Such a group 
 hardly could have lived by itself in safety 
 in the rough times which preceded the 
 abolition of private warfare. It would have 
 found no protection from any public au- 
 thority, so it must be capable of self-defence. 
 The State was still too feeble to undertake 
 police duties for the prevention of crime, 
 although it already had acquired authority 
 a 33 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 to punish it when committed. So, in a very 
 real sense, a man's house was his castle, and 
 must be garrisoned for defence. Sometimes 
 the garrison called in Norse the hird, and 
 in old English the menie was composed of 
 the real or the supposed kindred of the 
 house-owner; and its members often bore a 
 common name, that of an " eponymous " 
 ancestor. More often, especially in the case 
 of the kings, barons (her sellers] and notable 
 chiefs, their numbers were recruited from 
 voluntary adherents, who showed him that 
 personal loyalty, of which the ancient world 
 knew nothing, and which was the Teutonic 
 contribution to the forces which mould 
 political institutions. 7 
 
 7 The idea of representation, which made possible the 
 existence of a free community larger than a city, grew 
 out of this loyalty. The people were satisfied with what 
 v~as done in the Witanagemote at Winchester or West- 
 minster, if it were done with the approval of their chiefs 
 in attendance there. It was to them as if they all were 
 present and consented. Is it not this feeling which under- 
 lies the title of the popular branch of the English legis- 
 lature: "The Commons of England in Parliament 
 assembled ? " 
 
 34 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 There came to the royal Hall of Olaf the 
 Saint (1017-1030) an aged man, who asked 
 to be taken into his hird. The king asked 
 him how old he was, and he confessed that 
 he had lost the count of his years, but be- 
 lieved they were above one hundred. ' You 
 must have seen many great kings in your 
 time," the king said. " I have been with 
 your grandfather Harold the Fair-haired, 
 with Eric of Sweden, and with Gorm the 
 old of Danemark," he replied. " And which 
 of these had the best hird? " " I will show 
 you. In my youth I went to the court of 
 King Eric, and asked to be taken into his 
 hird. He told me to take any place that I 
 could. I began with the man who sat on his 
 left hand, and tried to turn him out, but I 
 could not, nor the next, nor the next, until 
 I came to the sixth. Afterwards I went to 
 the court of King Gorm, asked the same 
 question and got the same answer. But I 
 
 35 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 was halfway to the door of the Hall before 
 I could empty a place for myself to sit. 
 Then I fared north to the court of King 
 Harold, and he also gave me leave to take 
 what seat I could. But I wrestled with 
 every one to the very door of the Hall, be- 
 fore I could unseat any man of them. So 
 I think King Harold had the finest Tiird" 
 
 The position of a member of the house- 
 hold was no idle or easy one. The Nial-saga, 
 which Mr. Dasent has done into English 
 with the title, " The Story of Burnt Nial " 
 (Edinburgh, 1861), gives a vivid idea of 
 what went on in one district of Iceland be- 
 tween the years 970 and 1014. Thirty-five of 
 its chapters are taken up with " killings " 
 either of individuals or of groups, of 
 which 126 are specified by name, ending 
 with the destruction of Nial's whole family, 
 except his son-in-law, Kari Solmundson. 
 Had the burners been so fortunate as to 
 
 36 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 kill him as he was leaping through the flame 
 and smoke, they might have escaped all 
 punishment for their crime, as there would 
 have been left no one competent to prosecute 
 them before the All-Thing. What Kari 
 obtained was their banishment from Iceland, 
 besides the infliction of heavy fines. 
 
 Those who think that there was no parallel 
 to this in other countries, should look into 
 the " Paston Letters " for a picture of the 
 open lawlessness which prevailed in Eng- 
 land at the close of the Middle Ages. Or 
 into Esprit Flechier's Memoires sur les 
 Grands Jours d'Auvergne (1844) for a 
 lively account of the lawlessness of a French 
 province in 1665-66. Prosper Merimee in 
 his Columba (1840) has shown us this state 
 of society perpetuating itself in Corsica ; and 
 the mountain regions of the American states 
 of Kentucky and Tennessee furnish parallels 
 in the new world. 
 
 37 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 Of the inmates of the Hall, the chief 
 occupied a social position as central and as 
 elevated as his place within it. Over some 
 of its occupants he had the authority of a 
 father as well as chief, and he had the final 
 word in every situation which called for 
 deliberation. But he must not push this 
 authority too far. His hirdsmen looked to 
 be consulted in such matters, and if he made 
 the exercise of his authority too exacting, 
 they would seek a more courteous master. 
 Except the thralls, captives in battle or their 
 descendants, they were as free as himself; 
 and while they risked life and limb in his 
 defence during their term of service, they 
 were free to go or stay when it ended. 
 
 Among the signs of his rank were the two 
 carved posts, which separated his High Seat 
 from the rest of the long seat. In pagan 
 times these terminated in images of Thor 
 or Odin. When the Norwegian barons fled 
 
 38 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 to Iceland from the " violence " of Harold 
 the Fair-haired, they carried these posts with 
 them, and on approaching land they threw 
 them overboard, and made their homes wher- 
 ever these were washed ashore. Another 
 sacred thing was the cord which hung down 
 from the window in the roof, to open or 
 shut this ; and when any one came on a grave 
 message to the chief, such as soliciting the 
 hand of his daughter in marriage, he laid 
 hold of this cord while he delivered his 
 message. 
 
 The group within the Hall was a sort of 
 school, in which the inmates taught each 
 other all they knew. In the long winter 
 evenings, when the men were busy making 
 or mending weapons, tools and fishing- 
 tackle, and the women were making cloth 
 and garments, every one was expected to 
 contribute something to the entertainment of 
 the household. His travels into outlandish 
 
 39 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 parts, his adventures by land or sea, the 
 tales he had heard from Saga-men or travel- 
 lers, the songs he had made or remembered 
 having heard from the scalds, the riddles 
 and jests his wit or his memory supplied him 
 all came not amiss to pass the time pleas- 
 antly, and to call forth discussion from wise 
 and unwise. Thus was created a common 
 level of intelligence; and a large body of 
 knowledge became the property of all who 
 slept under the same roof. 
 
 Even when what was said could not be 
 classed as knowledge, but only as the prod- 
 uct of invention or of superstition, such as 
 the wild tales of pixies, huldres, fairies and 
 were-wolves, it yet had its use in developing 
 the imagination. The earth was a stern 
 world in their view, with dark corners^ in- 
 numerable, from which bogles might start 
 out at any minute. They had not acquired 
 the assurance that it was all their Father's 
 
 40 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 house, into whose most secret places they 
 were free to press with question and light. 
 One method of drawing out the talents of 
 each of their company, was to require that 
 when the mead-horn went its rounds, he to 
 whom it came must either sing a song, or tell 
 a story, or propound a new riddle. In the 
 great hall at Whitby in Northumberland, 
 where the Lady Hild presided as co-arb 
 over an ecclesiastical sept, according to the 
 usages of the church founded by St. Pat- 
 rick, 8 it was the custom that every one in 
 
 8 1 translate the narrative of the venerable Baeda into 
 the language of the earlier date. He makes Hild an 
 abbess, and the hall a monastery, of the Benedictine type 
 to which he was accustomed. He does not explain how 
 she came to have both men and women under the same 
 roof, and Mr. Stopford Brooke is driven to conjecture 
 a "double monastery." Had he read Dr. John Henthorn 
 Todd's "Patrick the Apostle of Ireland" (Dublin, 1864), 
 he would have got the right view. 
 
 Baeda is probably using the language of a later time 
 in making Caedmon " go out to the byre," or " go home " 
 when the harp approached him. A sept of the seventh 
 century would probably have no other building than its 
 Hall. Caedmon may have gone out and lain down for 
 warmth among the cattle. 
 
 41 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 turn should sing when he " saw the harp 
 approaching him." One of company, Caed- 
 mon, could not sing, and rose and left the 
 hall for the cattle-byre, when he saw his turn 
 coming. There he had the famous dream 
 in which the command of an angel awoke 
 in him the power of verse and song, and 
 made him the first of English poets upon 
 English soil, for the earlier Beowulf-epic 
 must have been composed on the continent 
 before the invasion of Briton by the Angles. 
 Latterly, at least, the inmates of the Hall 
 were not entirely dependent upon their own 
 gifts to make the long nights pass easily. 
 There arose, out of the customs of the Hall 
 itself, a class of saga-men and another of 
 scalds or minstrels, who found a welcome as 
 professional story-tellers and poets with the 
 greater chiefs and their households. The 
 longer their stories, and the larger the reper- 
 toire of their songs, the more welcome they 
 
 42 
 
THE OLD HALL (SKALI) 
 
 were, and especially so if these bore on the 
 achievements of the chief's ancestors. Hence 
 the sagas of Iceland and Norway, which 
 cast such a light upon social usages and 
 popular beliefs. Often, no doubt, the saga- 
 man drew upon his imagination when his 
 memory was at fault, and sometimes he and 
 the scalds rehearsed the praises of unworthy 
 men. But there was a limit to this, as 
 flattery that had no basis in fact might be 
 taken for sarcasm. So in the main we may 
 take the saga as embodying the facts as 
 known. 9 
 
 When the saga-man or the scald departed, 
 the sagas tell us, he did not go empty- 
 
 9 The general accuracy of the sagas is confirmed by the 
 correspondence of the Nial-Saga with the Irish chronicle, 
 "The Wars of the Gaels with the Galls," in their account 
 of the great battle of Clontarf (A.D. 1014). It is note- 
 worthy that the latter states that it was high tide at sun- 
 rise on Good Friday, the day of the battle, and that Prof. 
 Houghton of Trinity College found this to have been true, 
 by calculating the tides back to that year. 
 
 43 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 handed. Rings of silver or gold and gar- 
 ments of fine wadmal repaid his labors. 
 
 Such was the half-military life of our 
 forefathers in the old Halls -of northern 
 Europe, which they had constructed to re- 
 place the cave-houses of a still earlier date. 
 The transition from the Hall to the modern 
 house was gradual. It seems to have begun 
 with the erection of supplementary houses 
 for special purposes, and to have gone for- 
 ward to the separation of the Hall into 
 stories and rooms. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 IN the year of the Norman Conquest of 
 England, Olaf Kyrre ("the Quiet") be- 
 gan to reign over Norway, and he reigned 
 twenty-seven years. He saw the subjection 
 of the Danes to the native kings of Ireland, 
 as well as the establishment of a finer culture 
 in England by its Norman rulers and church- 
 men. It was an era of growing peace, which 
 gave opportunity for social progress and 
 improvement. To this Olaf's reign the 
 Norse traditions trace the beginnings of the 
 alterations which were to change the char- 
 acter of the old Hall. 
 
 The first of these was made in the sleep- 
 ing arrangements. With the diffusion of 
 Christian ideas of what is decent and be- 
 coming, there came a demand for a privacy 
 
 45 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 which the one-roomed Hall did not afford. 
 So the space under the eaves, and behind 
 the women's cross-seat was separated from 
 the rest of the Hall by a partition, and sub- 
 divided into bed-spaces for " lock-beds." 
 These were so named from being shut by a 
 door, which at night was fastened from 
 within by a stout wooden bolt, for safety. 
 In the Gisli-saga its hero incurs outlawry 
 for killing his brother-in-law, while he lay 
 asleep in his lock-bed. The night was warm, 
 and the murderer's victim had left the door 
 open for coolness. 
 
 The next step was to separate the west 
 end of the Hall from the rest by a wall 
 parallel to the western gable, and to divide 
 the space into four small rooms, two above 
 and two below. One of those below became 
 the entry, and that above it was the berk- 
 friet or belfry. At an opening in its floor 
 in times of peril, a sentinel was posted, who 
 
 46 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 commanded the entry. The other room be- 
 low became a store-room for dried fish and 
 the like, while the second room above was 
 made a sleeping-place, and called the " ram- 
 loft " or strong loft. One of these still 
 exists, in which one of the king Olafs slept 
 on his journey through his realm. 
 
 As the life of the household grew too com- 
 plex for such service as a great single room 
 could furnish, this need was supplied at first 
 by erecting additional buildings around the 
 hall. In great establishments, like the Irish 
 monastery at St. Gall, these, as old plans of 
 the premises show, were numbered by the 
 score. We also read in the Norse sagas of 
 guest-houses, audience-houses, seething- 
 houses for cooking, bath-houses, and cot- 
 houses for thralls and poor dependents. 
 Also of barns, kilns, threshing-houses, byres, 
 stables, sheep-folds and pig-sties. Some of 
 
 47 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 these additional buildings deserve especial 
 mention. 
 
 (a) The Bower was a strongly built 
 structure for the safe-keeping of valuables 
 and household ornaments. It was raised 
 upon wooden posts to a good height above 
 the ground, and between the steps which 
 led up to it and its threshold there was space 
 for a long stride, that the rats might be kept 
 out. Within it, in wooden chests, were 
 stored the finest clothes of the household, 
 the embroidered hangings, which adorned 
 the Hall on festive occasions, and the cups, 
 bowls and rings of silver and gold, which 
 now are to be seen in the northern museums. 
 Quite commonly the Bower became the 
 sleeping-place of the master and the mistress 
 of the household. Sometimes they gave 
 place to distinguished guests, if there were 
 no guest-house on the premises. Here also 
 the women plied their tasks in day time, espe- 
 
 48 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 cially with the needle. And some of the 
 bitterest family feuds grew out of what was 
 said at such times in the Bower. 
 
 The uses of the Bower are shown in the 
 Grettir- Saga. Grettir had been banished 
 from Iceland for man-slaying, and made his 
 way to Norway. The ship in which he took 
 passage met with bad weather, and ran the 
 risk of sinking. At last, through his power- 
 ful efforts they reached an island on the 
 coast, and were hospitably entertained by 
 the bonder (farmer) whose home it was. 
 When the rest went on to the mainland, 
 Grettir stayed in the island. When Yule- 
 tide came somewhat later than our Christ- 
 mas the bonder and most of his household 
 went off to keep the festival with a neighbor, 
 leaving on the island his wife, a sick 
 daughter, several servants and Grettir. One 
 day as Grettir was walking on the shore, he 
 saw a ship approaching. He knew by the 
 
 A 49 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 shields at the rowers' seats that it was a 
 pirate (viking) vessel; and as the bonder 
 had been promient in getting a law enacted 
 for the suppression of piracy, he presumed 
 that the visit was not friendly. He met them 
 at the landing place, helped them to secure 
 their ship, and congratulated them on their 
 coming in the nick of time. The bonder was 
 away from home, but his wife and daughter 
 were in the hall, along with thralls, and there 
 was a plenty of plunder to be had. As he 
 brought them up to the hall, the women 
 thought him to have joined their enemies, 
 and fled screaming. 
 
 Grettir got the pirates into the hall, made 
 them lay aside their weapons and their wet 
 garments, and warm themselves at the big 
 fire. Then he brought a store of ale and 
 mead, and plied them with it, while telling 
 them what fine things they would find in the 
 
 50 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 Bower. At last they got up to go and 
 examine its treasures, and Grettir went with 
 them. He waited for the favored moment to 
 slip out and bolt the door, and to run to the 
 Hall for his sword. He called upon the 
 male thralls to come and help him, which one 
 of them did. By the time the pirates had 
 forced open the door, Grettir was ready for 
 them. He and the thrall killed all but two, 
 who escaped for the time but were frozen 
 to death before morning. When he returned 
 to the Hall the bonder's wife gave him a 
 bright welcome, and made him sit on the 
 lower high seat, across the Hall from that 
 which her husband occupied. 
 
 In later times, when the family was small, 
 the Bower seems in some cases to have be- 
 come the real home, displacing the Hall, 
 which was kept for other uses. The poor 
 widow of Chaucer's " Nun Priest's Tale " 
 
 51 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 had both Hall and Bower, but she and her 
 two daughters dwelt in the Bower, while 
 her " cock, hight Chanticleer," 
 
 among his wives alle 
 Sat on his perch, that was in the halle. 
 
 (fc) The seething-house or kitchen must 
 have been devised for the comfort of wealthy 
 householders, who thought they would enjoy 
 their dinner the better for not having it 
 cooked under their noses. It was ranked 
 with the Hall as a " fire-house," and an old 
 Icelandic law provides that if there be both 
 a hall and a seething-house, the householder 
 must declare for which of the two the com- 
 munity shall be responsible in case it were 
 burnt down. This shows the existence of 
 a system of communal fire-insurance at a 
 much earlier date than we should have sup- 
 posed. Life-insurance on the contrary 
 hardly could have been a profitable business 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 at that time, when manslaying was so much 
 more common than arson. 
 
 (c) In the later sagas we hear of an earth- 
 house for concealment, in case the hall were 
 ransacked by its owner's enemies. It was 
 in one instance constructed behind his bed. 
 It commonly afforded an outlet for escape 
 through an underground passage, either 
 into one of the outhouses, or to some spot in 
 the neighborhood* where its mouth was con- 
 cealed among bushes, or something of the 
 sort. Sometimes, however, the entrance to 
 this passage was known to the chief's 
 enemies, and was used to enter the house 
 suddenly and unexpected. 1 
 
 (d) Some of the Icelandic chiefs had a 
 
 1 In colonial America passages like this were constructed 
 as a means of escape from Indian enemies. Tradition 
 assigns this as the purpose of the underground passage 
 from the Logan house at Stenton to the burial-place of the 
 family. But at no time could an attack from the Indians 
 have been anticipated at a point so near Philadelphia as 
 Stenton is. 
 
 53 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 bath-house, and when the hot- springs were 
 sufficiently near, hot water was conveyed 
 thither in skilfully constructed pipes or 
 channels. This supplied the means to a bath 
 of the type now called Turkish, but once 
 general throughout northern Europe. 
 
 The subdivision of the Hall into stories 
 and rooms was impossible so long as the 
 open hearth-fire required space for the 
 smoke to rise. But in Olaf Kyrre's reign a 
 change was made in many halls which fore- 
 casted modern arrangements for heating. 
 The hearth-fire was pleasant, but costly, as 
 it was wasteful of fuel. It burnt the forests 
 off Iceland. Ships were built of native 
 timber in the early days of the Norse settle- 
 ment, although the importation of timber 
 from the mother country began early and 
 was extensive. To-day there is hardly a 
 tree of a respectable size in the island, and 
 the soil has been injured by the denudation 
 
 54 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 of the country of its trees. So the Icelanders 
 had to burn turf, which the Scandinavians, 
 unlike the Celts, disliked for its strongly 
 pungent odor. In the Orkneys they must 
 have done so from the first. It is one of 
 several proofs that the Poetic Edda, al- 
 though first found in Iceland in the sixteenth 
 century, was not composed in that island but 
 in the Orkneys, that turf is mentioned as the 
 usual fuel. 
 
 In the two Scandinavian peninsulas the 
 havoc of the forests was not so great, yet 
 serious, especially in the vicinity of the towns 
 and cities, for to bring fuel from a distance 
 was not so easy as it now is. 
 
 To save fuel in heating the Halls, there 
 was devised a structure of masonry, with 
 space for a fire inside, and at the top an 
 escape for flame and smoke directly into the 
 Hall. Into this the fuel was introduced 
 every morning, and a brisk fire secured to 
 
 55 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 warm the whole structure, which then radi- 
 ated out heat all day. This was the ancestor 
 of the earthenware stove (or Kakel-ofn) of 
 the Scandinavian countries, Germany and 
 Russia, from which travellers, especially 
 Americans, derive little comfort. It seems 
 not unlikely that it was copied from Russia. 
 Two changes resulted from this new de- 
 vice. The first was the use of lamps to light 
 the Hall. As the light of the hearth-fire was 
 no longer available for this, bowls of fish-oil, 
 with vegetable wicks afloat in them and 
 burning, came into use. This probably fur- 
 nished more smell than illumination. But 
 the world had long to wait for a satisfactory 
 lamp. It was in the eighteenth century that 
 a Frenchman, in experimenting with a glass 
 tube held over a lamp-flame, found he could 
 regulate the supply of air so as to obtain 
 a smokeless flame, or to reduce the small 
 amount to a negligible quantity. 
 
 56f 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE. 
 
 To make the fire in the stove burn 
 brightly, it commonly was placed at the west 
 end of the Hall, where the door would fur- 
 nish the required amount of draft. So the 
 middle of the long seat was no longer the 
 place of greatest comfort; and the master 
 of the house shifted his seat from that to 
 the end of the long table. King Olaf Kyrre, 
 we are told, did so; but kings and nobles 
 generally retained the open hearth-fire, and 
 kept the middle of the long seat, while the 
 less wealthy householders followed the ex- 
 ample set by that king. For this reason the 
 heads of royal and noble houses in Europe 
 to this day sit at the middle, and not at the 
 end, of the table, while the heads of less 
 distinguished families sit at the table-head. 
 Queen Victoria, for instance, never sat at 
 the end of a table. 2 Yet in common parlance 
 
 2 1 am told that the early settlers of New England were 
 divided in practice in this usage, many of them keeping 
 the middle of the dining-table for the father of the family. 
 
 57 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 " the head of the table " has come to be re- 
 garded as the place of honor. " Where the 
 MacGregor sits is the head of the table," was 
 the proud boast of the chief of the Gregara. 
 
 But the great change came with the inven- 
 tion of the chimney in the twelfth century, 
 and in Normandy. 
 
 It is hard to realize that the chimney was 
 unknown to the ancients, whether of the 
 East, or of Greece and the Roman empire. 
 Our English Bible, indeed, in both the 
 Authorized and the Revised version of 
 1884, makes the prophet Hosea (xiii, 3) 
 speak of " smoke out of a chimney." The 
 Hebrew word here translated " chimney " 
 means an open grating, possibly in the roof, 
 for the escape of smoke and the admission 
 of light. The Hebrews and the Greeks had 
 no chimneys. The most that Roman luxury 
 could achieve was to heat air in one room, 
 
 58 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 and convey it by pipes into another. The 
 great architect Vitruvius, contemporary 
 with Cicero and Caesar, warns his readers 
 never to place fine wood-carvings in a room 
 where there is a fire, as the smoke will cer- 
 tainly ruin them. 
 
 It hardly can be said even now that the 
 chimney has achieved the conquest of 
 southern Europe. A photograph showing 
 the sky-line of any Mediterranean city, will 
 be found to contrast sharply with one of any 
 city of the North. In the contour of the 
 former the chimney is not nearly so promi- 
 nent as in the latter. An American boy 
 born in Honolulu surprised his classmates by 
 omitting chimneys in the pictures of houses 
 he drew on his slate, until he told them that 
 " in Hawaii houses have no chimbleys on." 
 In Japan the popular substitute for a chim- 
 ney is an opening in the gable-wall of the 
 house. 
 
 59 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 Americans have learned by experience 
 not to spend a winter in southern Europe, 
 if they can choose between that and the 
 north. Better Stockholm or Berlin than 
 Madrid or Rome, for comfort in the months 
 of frost and chill. The Italian offers you a 
 brazier of burning charcoal, at which you 
 may warm your fingers. In Madrid the 
 brazier is mounted on wheels, and taken 
 from room to room, to take the chill off; but 
 to get even moderately warm you must wrap 
 yourself up and march up and down the 
 Plaza del Sol until your blood circulates. 
 Not only is the city built on a hill, which ex- 
 poses it to all weathers, but fuel is exces- 
 sively dear, the prunings of the vines some- 
 times selling for as much as do the grapes. 
 Mr. Hannibal Hamlin, who was vice-presi- 
 dent when Mr. Lincoln was president, was 
 sent to Madrid as American minister by 
 
 60 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 President Grant. He belonged to the State 
 of Maine, which is not considered a warm 
 part of the republic, where indeed a fire is 
 generally welcome as August draws to a 
 close. It was Mr. Hamlin's boast that he 
 never had worn an overcoat. One winter in 
 Madrid satisfied him that he either must put 
 on an overcoat or come home. He resigned 
 the embassy and came back to Maine. 
 
 The chimney, as I have said, first made 
 its appearance in Normandy in the twelfth 
 century. Its own name, the name given to 
 its hearth in many languages of continental 
 Europe (poesil), and the name of the pro- 
 jecting wall which protects it from an ex- 
 cessive draft (jamb) are Norman words. 
 The oldest existing chimneys are found in 
 Normandy. Through the international 
 organization of the building trade of that 
 time, it spread rapidly over the north of 
 
 61 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 Europe, and was adopted by the wealthier 
 house-holders. 3 
 
 The coming of the chimney transformed 
 the Hall. As the smoke now passed directly 
 and entirely into the open air, the space for 
 it overhead was no longer needed. First, 
 part of this was brought into use by an 
 upper floor, which gave a loft extending 
 over half the Hall. Presently the loft 
 reached over the other half also, and the 
 
 3 The cot-dwellers continued to use the hole in the roof 
 until quite recent times. Jeremy Taylor praises "the poor 
 herdsman that dwells upon his own acre, and looks not 
 ambitiously on his neighbor's farm, nor covets the next 
 cottage, which yet he likes well, and thinks it excellent, 
 because it hath a chimney." The farmers also in some 
 places kept up the old fashion. The authors of "The 
 Vale Royall of England, or The County Palatine of 
 Chester" (1656) say that "in the building and furniture 
 of their houses, till of late years, they used the old manner 
 of the Saxons; for they had their fire in the midst of the 
 house, against a hob of clay; but within these forty years 
 they have builded chimneys." Robert Southey, quoting 
 this in 180T, adds, that "the last farm-house of this de- 
 scription was remaining in the township of Tong-with- 
 Hough, near Bolton, in Lancashire, within the last 
 twenty years." 
 
 62 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 house had a second story, which was reached 
 by a staircase outside the building. Then 
 the long, low side- walls were raised much 
 higher and pierced with windows. These at 
 first were mere openings in the wall, and 
 were closed in bad weather by a shutter. 
 Glass was too costly for any but the very 
 rich. 4 It had come into use for the churches 
 in the seventh and eighth centuries. But as 
 late as the sixteenth century, when the 
 nobles left their country homes to go up to 
 London, they had their glass windows 
 packed away until their return. No hand- 
 somer present could be made to a bride at 
 her wedding than a whole sash of glass, 
 which would enable her to have daylight in 
 her bed-room in all kinds of weather. 
 Along with the separation of the Hall 
 
 4 This seems to explain the venerable practice of break- 
 ing a man's windows by way of showing your dislike of 
 him. It was a serious business when glass was scarce and 
 dear. 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 into stories by floors, came the subdivision 
 of those stories by partition walls, and the 
 breaking up of the furniture into smaller 
 pieces. The long seat was moved out from 
 under the eaves, and resolved itself into 
 chests, chairs, settees, and much else. The 
 lock-bed now took whatever place in the 
 room was thought desirable, instead of being 
 fastened, as one of a series, to the wall. It 
 was still a structure of wood, and fully 
 boxed in ; and at night it was shut by a door 
 which was bolted. It stood so high that 
 steps were needed to climb up to it; and it 
 commonly was so large as to admit of a 
 number of occupants. The younger children 
 usually slept there with their parents; and 
 as these did not always come to bed sober, 
 many a poor child lost its life by being 
 " overlaid." It was therefore a distinct gain 
 when the trundle-bed was devised for the 
 children, and took its name from its being 
 
 64 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 trundled under their parents' bed in the day 
 time. 
 
 In much later times the big box-bed was 
 replaced by something less clumsy, but this 
 was hung with curtains and valances to keep 
 off drafts. Even then no one dared to go 
 to bed without a night-cap, lest he should 
 " get his death of cold." It was over those 
 bed-hangings that our grandmothers did 
 battle with the doctors of their time, who 
 told them it would be more wholesome to 
 sleep in a bed open to fresh air. 
 
 The old ladies, however, had much to say 
 for themselves. Those old houses were ex- 
 ceedingly drafty through their defects of 
 construction. The modern niceties of meas- 
 urement, the use of the spirit-level, and 
 the close fitting of woodwork, were un- 
 known. Floors were rarely free from slopes 
 and cracks; doors and sashes did not fit. 
 When the builder conjectured that it was 
 
 5 65 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 time to put on another floor, he trusted to 
 his eye and went ahead, without bothering 
 about exact measurements and levellings. 
 Even in the eighteenth century this was the 
 case. I have lived in a house which dated 
 from before 1750, and I found that the 
 corners of my library differed by three or 
 four inches in height ; while I could have put 
 my hand under any door of the house when 
 it was shut. 
 
 Literature reflects the passionate welcome 
 with which our forefathers greeted the re- 
 turn of Spring. The oldest English song, 
 of which we have the music, begins with the 
 joyful statement: 
 
 Sommer is y-comen. 
 
 Chaucer begins the Prologue to the Canter- 
 bury Tales with a picture which shows how 
 keenly the return of warmth was felt: 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 Whan that Aprile, with his schowres swoote, 
 The drought of March hath perced to the roote. 
 And bathed every veyne in swich licour, 
 Of which vertue engendred is the flour; 
 Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breethe 
 Enspired hath in every holte and heethe 
 The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne 
 Hath in the Ram, his halfe cours i-ronne, 
 And smalle fowles maken melodic, 
 That sleepen al the night with open eye, 
 So pricketh hem nature in here corages : 
 Thanne longen folk to gon on pilgrimages. 
 
 It is a far call from Chaucer (1387) to 
 James Thomson (1726), but in that year 
 the Scotch poet published his " Winter," 
 which he had written in bed, with his arm 
 through a hole in the blanket, trying to keep 
 warm. The practice of writing " Spring 
 poetry," which persists especially in 
 America, is a survival of the earlier attitude 
 toward the time of year when men escaped 
 the harsh severity of winter's frost, as they 
 felt it in damp and drafty houses. " How 
 
 6T 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 did you keep warm in that old house in 
 winter? " was asked of a venerable lady of 
 Philadelphia. " My dears," she answered, 
 " I never was warm in winter until I was 
 sixty years old." 
 
 A still greater change was going on in 
 society at large, and was assisting and even 
 hastening the transformation of the Hall 
 into the House. This was the cessation of 
 private warfare. Governments were grow- 
 ing strong enough to exercise a sort of police 
 for the prevention of crimes of violence, and 
 thus were making it unnecessary to garrison 
 the house, and to live under arms in a place 
 of strength. So the half -military group of 
 the Tiird or Menie 5 began to break up, and 
 
 5 It is to be regretted that this fine old word survives 
 only in the term " menial," which once was honorable 
 enough, but now emphasizes the subordinate and commer- 
 cial character of the servant and his services, and in 
 "minion" (F. mignon) which is equally contemptuous. 
 Such, however, has been the fate of many good words 
 caitif, boor, etc. 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 the natural family emerged to take its place. 
 The inmates of the house were greatly re- 
 duced in number, and the distance between 
 them and the family proper was greatly 
 widened. From retainers they became 
 hired servants merely, kept on wages and 
 liable to dismissal. The household school, 
 in which greatest and least acquired the 
 same elements of knowledge, and the same 
 acquaintance with traditional and oral litera- 
 ture, was broken up. Education became the 
 privilege of the few who could pay for in- 
 struction, while the rest clung to the frag- 
 ments of the old and popular culture of the 
 Hall, which survived in ballads and folk- 
 tales. The common workshop was replaced 
 by the shops of the town's people ; but here 
 also there was a loss of that goodfellowship 
 between master and men, which belonged to 
 the familiar relations of the earlier time. 
 Something of the old character clung to 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 the " menials " after the change, especially 
 in Scotland, where mediaeval usage still pre- 
 vailed. Dean Ramsay illustrates this in his 
 delightful " Reminiscences of Scottish Life 
 and Character " (1858), in the chapter " On 
 the Old Scottish Domestic Servant." The 
 Dean fails to trace the peculiarity of the old- 
 fashioned servant to its historic source, but 
 he illustrates it very amply. One laird, in 
 his wrath, ordered his man to leave the 
 place, and was answered, " Na, na, I'm no 
 gangin'. If ye dinna ken whan ye've a gude 
 servant, I ken whan I've a gude place." 
 Their care of the family interests was often 
 embarrassing. At a dinner-party, the 
 hostess said to her butler, " Thomas, Mrs. 
 Murray has not a salt-spoon." As Thomas 
 paid no attention, she repeated her words 
 in a peremptory tone. " Last time Mrs. 
 Murray was here, we lost a salt-spoon," was 
 the reply. 
 
 70 
 
FROM HALL TO HOUSE 
 
 Those old servants were very exacting, 
 expecting to be consulted in all serious 
 crises of the family life, and resenting every 
 slight. This was especially true where they 
 were attached to their masters by a sort of 
 hereditary tie, one generation after another 
 entering the service. They spoke to the head 
 of the house almost as equals, and over the 
 children they exercised sharp authority. 
 Those who speak with regret of the disap- 
 pearance of this class of menials, are aware 
 only of one side of its relations with the 
 home. Its loyalty they admire; its arro- 
 gance they would not endure. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 THE town-house is much the junior of the 
 rural " hall." Our Celtic, German and 
 Scandinavian forefathers did not love towns, 
 or town-life. As the Douglas said of him- 
 self, they " would rather hear the lark sing, 
 than the mouse cheep." Tacitus notes that 
 the Germans, even while they lived in thorps 
 (dorfs), for safety or convenience, yet built 
 their houses well apart from each other. 
 When they overran the Roman Empire in 
 the fifth century, they did not make their 
 homes in the cities which composed it. Some 
 of them they wiped out, but they left others 
 in the hands of their new subjects, under the 
 operation of Roman law and its municipal 
 rule, while they imposed upon them the pay- 
 ment of tribute and the duty of coining 
 money. 
 
 The rise of towns in Europe grew out of 
 
 72 
 
THE TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 a new division of labor, in which men ceased 
 to produce in a clumsy way on their farms 
 all they needed, and began to leave this or 
 that trade to persons expert in it. Then it 
 was found convenient to have these trades- 
 people gather into towns, where others 
 would be sure to find workmen of the kind 
 they wanted, when they had a purchase to 
 make. 
 
 Hardly any people lived in the towns ex- 
 cept trades-people, unless it were the 
 courtiers at the king's residence, or the 
 attendants on the courts of law. Even these 
 hurried off to their homes in the country as 
 soon as they had opportunity, and thus 
 escaped the risk of pestilence. Washington 
 Irving notes this as still the habit of the resi- 
 dents of London in his time; and since that 
 the growth of wealth has made it as common 
 in America as in England. 
 
 If we entered one of those early towns, 
 with the purpose let us say to buy a 
 
 73 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 saddle, we did not look for street-names on 
 the corners. The towns-people, knowing 
 that we probably could not read, did not 
 insult us by reminding us of our ignorance. 
 For the same reason they put no names on 
 signs. But each trade had its own symbol, 
 which every one recognized. The vintner 
 displayed a bush. Hence the saying in 
 Shakespeare, " Good wine needs no bush." 
 The doctor hung out three gilded pills; and 
 when the Medici passed from that profes- 
 sion to the loan business, they took the pills 
 with them, and there they stay. The barber- 
 surgeon, who combined the trimming of 
 beards and hair with the letting of blood, 
 displayed a white arm with streaks of red 
 on it ; and thus originated our barber's pole. 
 The harness-maker naturally exhibited a 
 horse's head ; and it is for this we are looking. 
 As we pass up the town on this search, we 
 keep to the middle of the street. Side-walks 
 
 74 
 
THE TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 there are none, but down the middle runs a 
 series of broad, flat stones, called in continen- 
 tal countries " the Burgomaster's Stone," be- 
 cause if His Honor the mayor came down it, 
 we should have to step off to give him room. 
 And this stepping off was a serious business. 
 From the middle of the street to the houses 
 on both sides lay a vast collection of filth, 
 ripening for transportation to the farms 
 when spring opened. In this the pigs 
 wallowed when driven in from the beech or 
 oak woods by the hog-reeve at the close of 
 day. Into this was thrown all the refuse and 
 filth of the house. 1 
 
 1 Until toward the close of the eighteenth century the 
 streets of Glasgow were lined with such middens, as were 
 those of Scotch towns generally. John Gait, in his 
 "Annals of the Parish" (1821), has a vivid picture of the 
 streets of a Scotch town, and of mishaps which befell 
 travellers in driving through* it. The filth of Edinburgh 
 was proverbial, as refuse of all sorts was flung into the 
 streets from every story of the lofty houses in the Old 
 Town, with the warning " Gardy loo " (Guardez de I'EaM) 
 to the passers-by. My mother told me that when she 
 visited Belfast in her girlhood, she found the town in- 
 tolerable for its bad smells, and was delighted to get away 
 from it to her home on the shores of Lough Neagh. 
 
 75 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 When we see the sign of a harness-maker, 
 we pick our steps across the midden to his 
 shop, aided probably by stepping-stones he 
 has placed for the convenience of his cus- 
 tomers. We find that the town-house stands 
 with its gable-end to the street, as the Dutch 
 houses still do, and also the older houses in 
 American towns built by the Dutch colonists 
 ( Schenectady, Albany and others). It was 
 built of the same materials as the country- 
 house, except that the roof was of thatch, 
 not of sod. It was at first one large hall, 
 lighted by a hearth-fire, and not divided into 
 stories or rooms. These came afterward, in 
 due time. The entrance was easier of access, 
 as there was no such need of defence. Its 
 peril was in the roof. As the thatch grew 
 very dry in the sun, especially during a long 
 drought, it was liable to catch fire. If the 
 women would not keep the fire in all night, 
 and went out in the morning to borrow a 
 
 76 
 
THE TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 bowl of embers (creish) from a neighbor, 
 and there was enough wind to blow the 
 sparks about, a conflagration followed. The 
 towns of the north of Europe were burnt 
 down about once in sixty years. This is why 
 those who look for very old houses, must seek 
 them in the country rather than in the towns. 
 To check this fire loss the substitution of 
 slates or tiles for thatch was enacted by law, 
 but hardly enforced. People preferred the 
 risk to the expense. 
 
 When we enter our saddler's house, we 
 find it a sort of double workshop. The big 
 room is divided between the men and the 
 women. On one side the master with his 
 journeymen and apprentices is busy with 
 the making of harness and saddles. On the 
 other the women of the family are spinning 
 and weaving wool or flax, cutting and sew- 
 ing garments, making candles, dressing and 
 cooking food, etc. 
 
 77 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 To the master we state what we want, but 
 are met by the disclaimer that he does indeed 
 make saddles, but not for persons in our 
 class. We really must go elsewhere for what 
 we need. As we know what this means, we 
 insist on being shown what he has in stock. 
 He turns up a part of the long-seat, and 
 brings from the chest thus opened one saddle 
 after another, showing them with evident 
 pride in his handiwork. At last we see one 
 we think will suit our need, and our purse. 
 Then the chaffering begins, to last an hour 
 or two. He asks about seven times as much 
 as he means to take, and we offer about a 
 seventh of what we mean to give. In a 
 highly dramatic colloquy, in which we start 
 several times to go elsewhere, and he as often 
 to put the saddle back into the chest, we 
 work toward an agreement. At the end we 
 declare we are swindled, and he that he is 
 
 78 
 
THE TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 ruined, and we part well pleased with the 
 transaction. 2 
 
 With the introduction of the chimney, the 
 town-house was transformed even more 
 rapidly than that of the country. In Eng- 
 land of the fifteenth century the chimney 
 was of obligation. When a new member was 
 admitted into one of the guilds, it was re- 
 quired that he should build him a house and a 
 chimney, and keep both in good repair. In 
 the town the division of the house into 
 stories, which the chimney made possible, was 
 welcome as an addition practically to the 
 area of the town in its densely peopled space. 
 Some audacity was shown in extending the 
 
 2 It was in this way that the chaffering of buyer and 
 seller was carried on all over Europe, somewhat as in the 
 bazars of Asia to this day. In England and America it 
 was put down by the Discipline of the Society of Friends, 
 which required Quaker tradesmen to adhere to the rule, 
 " One Price, and no Abatement." Whoever had to make 
 a purchase in haste, and had not time or taste for chaffer- 
 ing, looked for a Quaker in that line of trade, and bought 
 what he wanted in a few minutes. Then the rival shop- 
 keepers had to abide by the same rule. 
 
 79 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 higher stories over the street, so that even 
 when this was wide enough at the ground, it 
 was possible to shake hands across it at the 
 top. One of the old houses in York en- 
 croaches on the street in this way by fifteen 
 feet. This helped the mass of filth to keep 
 the town unhealthy, by checking the circula- 
 tion of the air. 3 
 
 To one European country belongs the 
 honor of anticipating the modern standard 
 of cleanliness. No kitchen-middens reeked 
 in the streets of the Dutch towns, and no 
 pigs wallowed there. Within Dutch houses 
 cleanliness was carried to a high point. 
 Tradition tells of one Dutch Mefrow, who 
 
 3 The streets were narrow enough, as also in ancient 
 times. Rome herself had but one street of respectable 
 width, the Via Sacra, along which religious processions 
 had to pass, especially the triumphs and ovations of the 
 Roman generals, on their way to sacrifice ox or sheep in 
 the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline mount. Sir Thomas 
 More, in his "Utopia" (1516), praises the people of that 
 ideal state for having no street of less than sixty feet in 
 width. 
 
 80 
 
THE TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 scrubbed through the floor and fell into the 
 cellar; but this is not authenticated by con- 
 temporary evidence. We have seen what 
 Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote of the filth of 
 the English Halls, with their stale rushes 
 and dogs' refuse on the floors. Mr. Charles 
 Reade takes the father of Erasmus as the 
 hero of his story, " The Cloister and the 
 Hearth " ( 1861 ) , and makes him turn up his 
 nose at the foulness of the inns of Germany 
 and France. 
 
 Wherever the Dutch went they took with 
 them their passion for cleanliness. In the 
 sixteenth century a Dutch woman, Mefrow 
 Sigrit, acquired great influence over King 
 Christian II of Denmark, and used this to 
 get the streets of the Danish cities paved and 
 kept clean. Later in that century one of 
 those towns was expecting a visit from a 
 personage of the royal family, when Jt 
 occurred to the city fathers that if his royal 
 
 fi 81 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 highness " had a nose on his face," he would 
 not relish the streets of their town. So they 
 enlisted the services of all the carts and 
 wagons in the town to bring up sand from 
 the seashore, and they spread this over the 
 filth to the depth of several inches, which 
 would serve to mask it so long as his visit 
 lasted. 
 
 Not that Denmark was a whit worse than 
 other countries than Holland. Koeln 
 (Cologne) was proverbial for its foulness 
 and its bad smells even in the eighteenth 
 century. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 THE towns of northern Europe had made 
 their beginnings in a despised poverty, but 
 during the Middle Ages they had advanced 
 fast in wealth and importance. Their sup- 
 port of the kings against the local authority 
 of the nobles had enabled monarchy to dis- 
 place the feudal aristocracy in the actual 
 control of the peoples, and thus to shift the 
 centre of political gravity and of sovranty. 
 
 This was especially true of those towns, 
 which had succeeded in making themselves 
 centres of manufacturing industry, and thus 
 to draw wealth into their hands from less 
 advanced countries. The towns of Flanders 
 had made that naturally barren region into 
 the foremost industrial centre of northern 
 Europe, able to meet the dukes of Bur- 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 gundy and the kings of France on equal 
 terms, as the cities of northern Italy had 
 met the emperors a century earlier. 
 
 As the town's people were now the 
 wealthiest class in Europe, the fact became 
 visible in both their public and their domestic 
 architecture. The great cathedral churches 
 of northern Europe were not usually the 
 fruit of royal or noble piety and generosity, 
 or the creation of the monastic orders or of 
 wealthy churchmen. They were built and 
 adorned by the tradesmen of the towns in 
 which they stand, and were rivalled in costli- 
 ness and beauty by the magnificent town- 
 halls, in which municipal architecture reaches 
 its highest point. 
 
 Many of the private houses erected during 
 the later Middle Ages and the period of the 
 Renascence take rank among the finest 
 monuments of artistic taste and skill which 
 those cities possess. Their large design and 
 
 84 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 their exquisite details show them to be the 
 work of genuine artists. Those of Nurem- 
 berg are best known, but many French, Ger- 
 man and Swiss towns are the fortunate 
 possessors of others not less handsome. The 
 men of that age loved to beautify not only 
 the houses in which they worshipped God, 
 but also the places of their daily toil and their 
 nightly rest of their domestic joys and 
 sorrows. 1 
 
 The town-house was no longer a " block- 
 house," as Professor Lund calls the country- 
 house. The close association of thousands 
 of families in one social bond had transferred 
 
 ^ee the beautifully illustrated article Maison " in M. 
 Viollet-le-Duc's " Dictionnaire de I' Architecture." I regret 
 that I have not been able to make much use of this 
 eminent author's " Histoire de I' Habitation Humaine." It 
 seems to be rather the geography than the history of the 
 subject, as no growth or evolution connects its several 
 chapters. On the other hand I have had abundant help 
 from Prof. Troels Lund's work "Das Tdgliche Leben in 
 Skandinamen wahrend des Sechszehnten Jahrhunderts " 
 (Copenhagen: 1882). 
 
 85 
 
\ 
 THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 the line of defence from the threshold to the 
 ring- wall, and to the strongly built and care- 
 fully watched gates which pierced it. Build- 
 ings outside the wall had not much more than 
 a temporary character, as they were liable to 
 be swept away in anticipation of a siege, so 
 as not to cover the approach of the enemy. 
 
 Yet the safety within the town was not 
 entire. Thieves abounded and shrank from 
 no violence, as knowing that their lives were 
 forfeit if they were taken. Even reputable 
 London tradesmen were known to have 
 sallied out at night-fall, when their own 
 shutters were up, to rob the shops of their 
 neighbors. 2 So a half-soldierly quality at- 
 tached to the townsmen even in time of 
 peace. They and their journeymen might 
 have to defend their stock of materials and 
 their finished work by force of arms, in the 
 absence of any police worth mentioning. 
 
 2 See Pike's "History of Crime in England," Vol. i, pp. 141-2. 
 
 86 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 And this fact naturally modified the con- 
 struction of their houses. 
 
 The materials of which town-houses were 
 built were changed in the sixteenth century. 
 The frame-work of wood continued in use, 
 but the filling changed from clay to stone 
 or brick and was laid in mortar. On the 
 roofs thatch was giving place to shingles, 
 tiles or slates, under the pressure of the law, 
 but slowly. As the manufacture of glass 
 was naturalized in every country of Europe 
 during this century, it grew cheaper and 
 more in use. But in the earlier part of the 
 century it was still so costly that a Danish 
 king, in his plans for a new palace, specifies 
 one part only as to be furnished with glass 
 windows. And their relative costliness 
 caused such windows to be firmly fixed into 
 the wall, to avoid the risks which attended 
 opening and shutting them. More light thus 
 meant less fresh air. Before the end of the 
 
 87 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 sixteenth century, however, what had been 
 the privilege of a few was becoming the 
 general possession of all but the poorest. 
 
 Some important additions were made to 
 the equipment of the house, while the older 
 forms of furniture were elaborated to a de- 
 gree which showed the new taste for house- 
 hold art. One was an hour-glass, which, 
 being costly, was kept in a place of especial 
 safety. Then came the clock, which at first 
 lay in a square box, face up, like a compass. 
 The Nurembergers had already invented the 
 watch, but that pocket timepiece was rarely 
 seen. The clock, especially if it struck the 
 hours, and still more if the quarters, was de- 
 lightful, and the possession of it conferred 
 social distinction. But clocks generally kept 
 bad time before Galilei's discovery of the 
 law governing the motion of the pendulum, 
 and the application of the discovery to clock- 
 making by his son. The actual reliance for 
 
 88 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 correct time was on the sun-dial, and that 
 of course was rarely available in the cloudy 
 atmosphere of northern Europe. 
 
 The subdivision of the house, which re- 
 sulted from the introduction of the chimney, 
 followed a plan so general that it may be 
 taken as normal. Inside the front door, 
 which generally lay open in the daytime, was 
 an anteroom of larger dimensions than in 
 later houses. Here guests laid aside their 
 over-clothing and their weapons, except 
 sword or dagger. From this two doors 
 opened. That to the right led into the work- 
 shop, where master, journeymen and ap- 
 prentices labored. From this room there 
 was also an opening into a stall on the street, 
 where wares were offered for sale. The door 
 on the left was into the living-room, which 
 was at all ordinary times the social centre of 
 the home. It was lighted as well as warmed 
 by an open hearth-fire under a chimney. 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 Here old and young gathered in the even- 
 ings, somewhat as in the old Hall, but a far 
 less miscellaneous company. Here the food 
 was served from the adjacent kitchen. Here 
 also in many cases were box-beds for the 
 older members of the family. 
 
 On high days and holidays, such as wed- 
 dings, christenings, and the visits of dis- 
 tinguished guests, the living-room was dis- 
 placed by the " great room," in which the 
 family's treasures were kept, and its best 
 decorative hangings were displayed. Among 
 these none were more notable than the great 
 bed, called in some countries " the heaven 
 bed," because of its canopy. On this bed 
 immense sums were expended, the finest 
 Flemish, Italian and oriental fabrics being 
 employed in its curtains and its canopy. 
 Queens and princesses vied with each other 
 in their outlay on their beds ; and in wills of 
 that age astonishing sums are mentioned as 
 
 90 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 having been spent on them. In earlier times 
 this great room was on the ground-floor; but 
 to get more space it was afterward placed on 
 the second story. The facilities that story 
 offered for several bedrooms were not em- 
 ployed to the extent we should expect. The 
 old idea of the family sleeping together 
 seems to have clung to them, and to have 
 made them crowd into one or a few rooms at 
 night. 3 
 
 Another feature of the upper story of the 
 town-house was the open gallery, extending 
 along the front of the house, under the 
 shelter of its protruding roof. This was 
 originally a part of the out-door staircase, 
 by which that story was reached. It re- 
 
 8 This type of house seems to have been brought to New 
 England by the early settlers. Mr. William B. Weeden, in 
 his "Economic and Social History of New England" 
 (Boston, 1890) says that " a common arrangement of the 
 first floor was in a ' great room ' i.e., company room 
 and a kitchen, each twenty feet square, with a bedroom 
 and a large milk and cheese pantry." 
 
 91 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 placed the Bower of the earlier house, as in it 
 the women of the family carried on the 
 lighter employments of their sex, while they 
 enjoyed the air in the closest approach to 
 purity that the town's streets permitted. It 
 had some resemblance to the open loggia of 
 the Italian house. 
 
 In the rear of the living-room lay the 
 kitchen, with a large hearth-fire on a raised 
 hearth, and a chimney. Seething was done 
 in great kettles suspended over the fire from 
 the crooks, and roasting on spits placed in 
 front of the open fire and constantly turned. 
 In great houses the kitchen fires were of 
 charcoal to avoid smoking the food; but 
 generally the fuel was wood or peat, as the 
 possibilities of coal had not been discovered. 
 
 The provisions as indeed the word means 
 were not bought from day to day, but pro- 
 vided in quantities which would} last for 
 months or even a year. Through the winter 
 
 92 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 salt meats and fish were the main depend- 
 ence, supplemented by game and fresh fish 
 in summer. The favorite dish was a meat 
 pasty (dish-pie). Vegetables were used 
 very little, being in some countries inaccessi- 
 ble. In England kitchen-gardening was 
 introduced by the religious refugees from 
 France and the Low Countries. Before that 
 Queen Elizabeth had to send to the Con- 
 tinent for the vegetables, when she wanted 
 to give a grand dinner. The cookery-books 
 of even the next century surprise us by their 
 slight reference to vegetable food, and their 
 array of meat and fish dishes. 
 
 Water, being generally impure in the 
 supply of the towns, was not drunk by young 
 or old, rich or poor. Every house brewed 
 its own beer, and the big kettles of the 
 kitchen came into this use. 
 
 The last room I shall mention is the bath- 
 room, for giving the steam bath of the type 
 
 93 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 now known as Turkish or Russian. When 
 the peoples of Europe wore fur or wool next 
 the skin, the use of the steam bath was 
 general, and was thought indispensable. 
 England alone had not such baths, but we 
 find them coming into use as a novelty in 
 Elizabeth's reign. On the Continent every 
 householder who could afford it had his bath- 
 room of this type. But even where he had 
 one, he was not unapt to prefer the public 
 baths of the same sort, which existed in all 
 the continental towns, and especially to take 
 his guests to these. They were the club- 
 houses and the taverns of the time. Ac- 
 quaintances were made, good fellowship 
 cultivated, games played, and beer in abun- 
 dance drunk in the soaking atmosphere. 
 
 The discovery that these places were the 
 means of spreading diseases gave them their 
 first backset, and brought the home bath 
 again into favor. But the great change 
 
 94 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 came with the general use of linen for under- 
 clothing, which made it possible for men to 
 be comfortable with less bathing, as they 
 wore clean linen next their skins. This 
 brought with it the family festival called 
 " washing day," observed as a weekly feast 
 in modern times, but formerly but once a 
 month, or even in some countries but twice a 
 year. In the latter case an entire room of 
 the house was devoted to the reception of 
 soiled clothes. 
 
 The streets were less changed than were 
 the houses. The townsman admitted of 
 interference on the part of the government 
 in many other things, but not with his privi- 
 lege of keeping the surroundings of his house 
 iri a condition which made life uncomfortable 
 and death by pestilence common. He still 
 claimed his rights in the space between the 
 house and the middle of the street. That 
 part which lay next his house, and was 
 
 95 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 covered by his protruding upper-stories and 
 his projecting roof, he treated as especially 
 his own. Here he erected his stall for selling 
 his wares, and added benches for the com- 
 fort of himself and his visitors, chests to hold 
 household refuse, and the like. 
 
 The increase of carts and coaches was be- 
 ginning to encroach on his rights, by using 
 much of the narrow street for travel. This 
 space was not cleaned, nor was there any 
 even pavement under its accumulations. The 
 driver proceeded at his own risks, over piles 
 of refuse, deep hollows full of foul water, 
 and the like. By way of a partial drainage, 
 the middle of the street, which had been its 
 highest point, was now hollowed into a 
 channel, which served as open sewer. Foot- 
 passengers now walked as close to the houses 
 as possible. Somewhat later posts were 
 placed to distinguish the sidewalk from the 
 
 96 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 rest of the street, but there was no smoother 
 pavement 4 for those who used it. 
 
 In the centuries succeeding, the most im- 
 portant change in the town-house was the 
 removal of trades to separate buildings, first 
 workshops, and then factories. This meant 
 the more complete dedication of the house to 
 home uses, through the elimination of alien 
 elements from its life. James Watt by the 
 invention of an economic steam-engine 
 (1769) enabled an organization of industry 
 the workshop could not compete with, as to 
 quality and price. But even before, as well 
 as after, Watt's invention, the liberation of 
 women from many domestic employments 
 was in progress. New and independent 
 industries sprang up, which took from them 
 
 4 In America, Philadelphia was the first city that estab- 
 lished smooth sidewalks, paving them with brick. Franklin 
 remarks that a Philadelphian walking over the cobble- 
 stones of New York seemed to be suffering from corns; 
 while a New Yorker on the sidewalks of Philadelphia re- 
 minded him of a parrot sprawling over a mahogany table. 
 
 7 97 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 their spinning and weaving, knitting, tailor- 
 ing, candle and soap-making, brewing of 
 beer, baking, distilling of extracts, preserv- 
 ing fruits and berries, plaiting of straw, and 
 the like. This process of elimination was 
 not altogether relished by the house-mis- 
 tresses, who felt at each change that they 
 were losing a province of life which belonged 
 to them. My paternal grandmother used to 
 say that the house would lose half its charm, 
 if the maids did not sit down to the spinning- 
 wheel when their other tasks were done, and 
 give her the familiar music of early days. 
 But both the better quality and the lower 
 price of the goods produced on a larger scale 
 and with modern machinery, carried the day, 
 against a sentiment which Mr. Ruskin tried 
 to revive in his time. 
 
 A still more beneficent change was the 
 introduction of pure water into the cities, 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 and into houses within city bounds. There 
 the modern world was challenged by the 
 great remains of the acqueducts, which 
 brought pure water from the Sabine and 
 Latin hills to the imperial city. The chal- 
 lenge has been more than met, as under- 
 takings of this sort in modern times surpass 
 those of the ancient world in the audacity of 
 their ingenuity, the distances overcome, and 
 the abundance of the supply. The gain to 
 the family was in quantity as well as quality, 
 a sufficiency for all household uses, whether 
 of cleansing, or cooking, or drinking, having 
 been secured it. And the purity of the 
 supply established the modern habit of 
 drinking water, to which our remoter fore- 
 fathers had a well grounded repugnance. 
 
 Not until early in the nineteenth century 
 did there arise any substitute for the tallow 
 candle, and the lamp for burning fish-oil. 
 
 99 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 Then from Glasgow came illuminating gas, 
 which, from London and Philadelphia as 
 centres of this enterprise, was spread over 
 the two worlds. The gain was much greater 
 than we are apt to realize. Candle-grease 
 had been one of the plagues of life. It 
 dropt on clothes, stained carpets, spotted 
 furniture, and added an undesirable flavor 
 to food. And candle light was so meagre 
 and inadequate, especially when a church or 
 other public building had to be lighted, that 
 its use could not but impair sight. The 
 staunchest upholders of the traditions of the 
 past did not deny that in this respect the 
 world changed for the better. 
 
 Illuminating gas also enabled the lighting 
 of the streets in a new and fairly effective 
 fashion. Heretofore smoky oil lamps hung 
 across the street on ropes, had been the only 
 
 dependence, just making " darkness visible." 
 
 100 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 Hence the necessity for link-boys, to light 
 to their homes those who must return after 
 night-fall, especially in winter. Gaslight 
 also made possible the policing of the towns, 
 for the safety of life and property. The 
 old watchman, carrying his horn lanthorn, 
 and calling out the hours as they passed, 
 gave way to the modern officer on his beat. 
 
 The policeman's work was made much 
 easier by the construction of proper roads 
 and streets, to the advantage of health 'as 
 well as travel. Outside of Holland- .and r a 
 few favored localities, the old roads were 
 little better than tracks worn by travel, up 
 hill and down dale, involving almost a cer- 
 tainty of an upset on any journey of greater 
 length. It was in the second half of the 
 eighteenth century that the business of road- 
 making and street-making took hold of the 
 
 practical English mind, with the result that 
 101 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 the roads of the British Empire now sur- 
 pass those of Assyrian and the Roman, and 
 are not yet equalled by those of any other 
 country. Not only do good highways 
 traverse every part of the British Islands, 
 but even in outlying dependencies in Hong 
 Kong or Mauritius better roads are to be 
 found than between the largest centres of 
 population in America. 
 
 ..Thfer ;city streets generally presented a 
 mojve (Difficult problem, as obliged to sustain 
 a much greater stress of traffic, and as re- 
 quiring a nicer finish. The middens were 
 now cleaned out of the towns, and the space 
 thus laid bare was taken in hand by the 
 municipal rulers to supply a place of safe 
 and pleasant travel. The mere separation 
 for foot-passengers of a part of the streets 
 from the rest by posts those posts which 
 
 Dr. Johnson must touch on his way home to 
 102 
 
LATER TOWN-HOUSE 
 
 Bolt Court or Gough Square gave way to 
 a raised and smooth pathway bounded by a 
 kerb-stone, and unencumbered by the stalls 
 and the benches of the house-owners. The 
 roadway was the subject of various experi- 
 ments before Telford the Macadam of the 
 cities showed that the main thing in a good 
 street is not the surface, but the foundation 
 on which it rests. This settled, it remains 
 to determine what possible surface is the 
 best, i.e., lasts longest, is the most easily re- 
 paired, is least hard on the feet and legs of 
 horses, and is the wholesomest. It cannot be 
 said that this problem has been solved, but 
 the present choice lies between asphalt and 
 wooden blocks. 
 
 The open sewer, which took the place of 
 the burgomaster's stone in the middle of the 
 street, was now displaced by underground 
 sewers, not without some increase of peril 
 
 103 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 to health, as these are connected with the 
 latrines of the houses, and sewer-gas is the 
 plague both of the builder and the plumber. 
 The regular cleaning of the streets was 
 undertaken, but in a fashion which still is 
 very unsatisfactory. The asphalt pave- 
 ments of our time bring into light the harm 
 done by the horses of a great city in keeping 
 its streets dirty, and suggesting the exclu- 
 sion of all quadrupeds from the city limits. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE HOUSE OF TO-DAY 
 
 IF any one who knew nothing of the his- 
 tory of the House, were asked to define the 
 word, he probably would answer that it is a 
 structure of wood or masonry, divided into 
 stories by floors of wood, and these into 
 rooms by slight party walls; lighted by 
 glass windows; heated by stoves, furnaces, 
 or open hearth-fires; roofed with shingles, 
 slates, tiles or sheets of metal ; and meant for 
 the home of a natural family and its servants. 
 
 This definition stands for the stage now 
 reached in the evolution of the House, but 
 at no point does it define the House in which 
 our forefathers lived a thousand years ago. 
 And probably it is just as poor a description 
 of the houses in which our posterity will be 
 living a thousand years hence. It stands 
 
 105 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 merely for the present stage in a process of 
 development, which began with the cave, 
 and will end with the palace. In coming 
 centuries people will wonder at the incon- 
 veniences we put up with, at the awkward 
 arrangements which seem to us the height of 
 ingenuity, and at our lack of insight into 
 the nature of the problem we had to solve in 
 devising a suitable home for the family. 
 
 To learn what direction will be taken by 
 the farther evolution of the House, we 
 naturally look back upon that through which 
 it has passed already. And we find here 
 four indications worthy of notice: Health- 
 fulness, comfort, adaptability and economy. 
 
 1. Healthfulness. The primitive house, 
 both in its structure and its environment 
 showed the indifference of its occupants to 
 the things which make for health and length 
 of life. They dispensed with ventilation, ex- 
 cept where it was forced upon them by bad 
 
 106 
 
THE HOUSE OF TO-DAY 
 
 carpentry and defective masonry. They 
 permitted a degree of filthiness in their halls, 
 which we would find intolerable in our 
 streets. And they accumulated dunghills at 
 their very doors. Their streets were narrow 
 and unsafe for every kind of travel; and 
 were encroached upon above by projecting 
 stories and roofs. 
 
 These evils we have corrected or are cor- 
 recting. In the most crowded parts of our 
 great cities there is a striving after a cleanli- 
 ness, which was not to be seen in the royal 
 palaces of the past. The public mind is per- 
 vaded by an enthusiasm for sanitary precau- 
 tions of this kind. Sanitas sanitatum, omnia 
 SanitaSj as D'Israeli said in jesting variation 
 of the Royal Preacher (Ecclesiastes i, 2). 
 But our methods of heating our houses are 
 still highly unwholesome. The ordinary 
 furnace discharges into our rooms currents 
 of parched and moistureless air, which work 
 
 107 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 ruin to throat and lungs, skin and liver, in 
 winter. And in summer the ventilation of 
 our rooms without introducing cold drafts is 
 an unsolved problem. 
 
 Especially the cleansing of the house and 
 its adjacent street presents a difficulty we 
 have not overcome. We are beginning to 
 learn how deleterious dust 1 is to the human 
 organism, and how fertile in infection in 
 pulmonic and other diseases. City homes 
 stand on streets, where every wind carries 
 
 1 Archaeological exploration has shown us how effectually 
 it can bury a city, during any long suspension of popular 
 activity. It was necessary to dig down thirty-seven feet to 
 reach that pavement of the Roman Forum, on which Cato 
 and Cicero had walked. This was supposed to be the 
 earliest level, but on cleaning out some of the old wells in 
 the Forum, they came on one pavement under another to 
 the number of a dozen. So the remains of Nineveh were 
 a mound of dust, which Xenophon, in the Anabasis, men- 
 tions as being on the line of march of the retreating 
 Greeks, but without the slightest notion of what those 
 dust-heaps covered. Schliemann found one Troy beneath 
 another, and much the same condition at Argos. The 
 Palestine Survey found seven such cities in the mound 
 where Lachish stood, and the third from the bottom was 
 that which Joshua destroyed in his conquest of Canaan. 
 
 108 
 
THE HOUSE OF TO-DAY 
 
 with it a load of dust of varied character, 
 and often whirls it high into the air. When 
 a house long untenanted is opened anew, it 
 is found that everything in it is coated with 
 dust, in spite of efforts made to seal it 
 against this subtle intruder. And for most 
 of us the only correctives are the broom, the 
 brush, and the duster, which do as much to 
 diffuse it as to remove it. 
 
 2. Comfort. Our forefathers seemed 
 to regard as a piece of effeminacy that con- 
 sideration for our ease which makes us prefer 
 soft to hard, adaptation to the human form 
 in furniture, 2 and the like. We have ad- 
 vanced greatly on their arrangements. We 
 can be reasonably warm in winter, if not 
 
 2 It is noteworthy that there was a prejudice at first 
 against taking advantage of many comforts. Women at 
 least held it a point of good manners, until within the 
 memory of people still living, not to let their backs come 
 into contact with the back of a chair, nor to sit in any but 
 the most erect position. It was also an offence to rest 
 elbow or arm on a dining table. 
 109 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 always reasonably cool in summer. Carpets 
 and rugs are softer under the foot than a 
 bare or a sanded floor. Windows which shut 
 and open, and are fitted with glass, are better 
 than holes in the wall shut by a wooden 
 shutter, or glass sashes imbedded in the wall 
 for safety. Doors which fit their frames 
 save us from drafts. Wall papers of pleas- 
 ant design, and pictures multiplied by 
 modern processes, rest the eye better than 
 did a bare wall, or even the elaborate tapes- 
 tries of the wealthy. And the whole equip- 
 ment of a house, tables, chairs, lounges, 
 china, cutlery, etc. are obtainable of better 
 design and at less cost, and enable us to 
 take life easier. 
 
 But we still climb from story to story 
 on the series of small platforms we call stair- 
 cases, at risk of life and limb, and accept 
 these as a law of nature, although safety- 
 elevators have made them superfluous. The 
 no 
 
THE HOUSE OF TO-DAY 
 
 time may come when curious folk will go a 
 long way to see a staircase, and will ask any 
 of us who survive, " Did you really go up 
 and down by that funny arrangement? 
 Didn't you find it very tiresome, and very 
 dangerous? Did people never fall on it?" 
 And then we will begin to recall our own 
 tumbles, from the first days of adventurous 
 youth to the coming of the domestic lift. 
 And perhaps we will remember also how a 
 fall down a staircase cost us Helen Hunt 
 Jackson, and other less notable victims. 
 
 We also still endure in our houses in the 
 heat of summer, the added heat of kitchen 
 ranges for the preparation of food. We 
 still endure the heat from gas-jets and oil- 
 lamps for lighting the house, when far 
 cooler means of illumination are accessible to 
 most of us. We still have loads of coal car- 
 ried into our basements, to keep up fires in 
 
 furnaces and ranges, when these services 
 111 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 could be far better rendered from outside 
 our homes. 
 
 3. Adaptability. The primitive house 
 was adapted to the uses of the primitive 
 group, which was a military, industrial and 
 educational unit. That group has passed 
 away, leaving traces of its existence and its 
 demands on the house of our day, especially 
 in the perpetuation of trades within the 
 house. Men's work has gone to factory 
 or workshop. The trades of the brewer, 
 baker, chandler, weaver and tailor have re- 
 moved the most of the employments once 
 imposed by tradition on the house-mistress 
 and her companions. 
 
 But some linger still, (a) The public 
 laundry has not yet entirely superseded the 
 domestic washing-day. (&) The work of 
 the baker is still rivalled in many homes, 
 where the preference for " home-made 
 bread " lingers. (c) The heating of the 
 
THE HOUSE OF TO-DAY 
 
 house in most cases is done from its own 
 furnace, instead of having heat supplied 
 from some central plant, where the use of 
 coal in a scientific way ought to make it 
 cheaper and better, (d) Worst of all, the 
 preparation of food is a business still im- 
 posed on the mistress and her servants. 
 
 These are the principal reminders of the 
 old system, in which the housewife was truly 
 a " Gill of all trades," and had very little 
 time or strength for her proper work of 
 making the home attractive and pleasant, the 
 centre of human affections, the resting-place 
 of the weary. They all are obstacles to the 
 adaptation of the modern house to the real 
 needs of the natural family. 
 
 Especially the modern house fails to 
 realize its idea as the home of such a family, 
 because of the residence of others than the 
 family within its walls. In the early times 
 their presence was unavoidable, and their 
 
 8 us 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 relations with the family were personal and 
 human. They were members of the only 
 group that could constitute a household with 
 safety; and a bond of personal loyalty held 
 them to the head of the house. But the ser- 
 vant of to-day is essentially a wage-earner, 
 living in the house on a commercial basis, 
 and supposed to be compensated for such 
 services as are rendered by the money-pay- 
 ment. And yet there clings to the position 
 something of the old claim to more than 
 wages, and this is reinforced by continuous 
 residence in the house. 
 
 Furthermore the mistress of the house is 
 obliged by the conditions of modern service 
 to undertake the rule and discipline of a 
 number of persons, whether many or few, 
 who have no kinship or personal relation 
 with her, in addition to the care of her chil- 
 dren and her husband. She has some re- 
 sponsibility for their health, their morals and 
 
 114 
 
THE HOUSE OF TO-DAY 
 
 their manners. She has to select her ser- 
 vants, train the inexpert, control the way- 
 ward, and keep all in some sort of good 
 humor with each other and with herself. 
 This requirement in many cases falls upon 
 women who have had no experience in their 
 youth to guide them in later years, as they 
 have been brought by change of fortune into 
 a position in which they look to others to do 
 for them what they always had done for 
 themselves. And the housewife has to en- 
 dure frequent changes in their number, as 
 they grow dissatisfied, and seek to " better 
 themselves," by finding knother mistress. 
 
 On the other side the maids have enough 
 to complain of. They are obliged, in many 
 cases, to live under rules which are extem- 
 porized from day to day. They are required 
 to do work in a needless hurry, because they 
 are not notified in time what is expected of 
 them. They are stowed away in any part 
 
 115 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 of the house which is not needed for other 
 uses. Their rooms are often so cold in win- 
 ter and so hot in summer, as to be almost 
 uninhabitable. They have no society except 
 that of other servants, if there are any; and 
 their whole time, except what is needed for 
 sleep, and with the exception of one-half 
 day a week and every other Sunday, is 
 exacted of them. So most of the girls, who 
 might have been available for domestic ser- 
 vice, revolt against its conditions, and seek 
 employment in shops and factories, where 
 they are mistresses of their time outside of 
 working hours, and do not live the lonely 
 life of the household servant. An American 
 manufacturer, who employed girls by the 
 hundred in his garment factory at five dol- 
 lars a week, was actually unable to secure 
 one of them for service in his suburban 
 home at twenty-five dollars a month, with 
 her board and lodging. New York reports 
 
 116 
 
THE HOUSE OF TO-DAY 
 
 places for 100,000 domestic servants, which 
 cannot be filled. Every class in turn has 
 abandoned such service native Americans, 
 Irish, Scandinavians, Germans until it 
 seems probable that the main dependence 
 will be the negro and the Chinese. Yet these 
 very classes enter the higher service of the 
 trained nurse, where greater liberty is 
 enjoyed. [ 
 
 The portrait of the modern servant drawn 
 by the mistress, and that of the modern mis- 
 tress drawn by the servant, are equally un- 
 true to life, except in a minority of cases. 
 Human beings, living under the same roof, 
 come in most cases to a sort of understand- 
 ing, which often rises through esteem into 
 affection. But there is truth enough in the 
 complaints on both sides to show that the 
 present arrangements for the care of the 
 home are becoming intolerable, and that a 
 
 117 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 better organization of this side of household 
 life is imperatively needed. 
 
 It is not strange, therefore, that many 
 families have given up housekeeping under 
 present conditions, and find refuge in lodg- 
 ings or apartment-houses. It even has been 
 suggested that this indicates what will be the 
 housekeeping of the future, when separate 
 houses will be abandoned, and families will 
 gather in large groups under one roof. It is 
 undeniable that the apartment-house has 
 been a relief for many weary and perplexed 
 housekeepers, as it furnishes an escape from 
 the wear and tear of preparing three meals a 
 day, and from the perplexities of the prob- 
 lem of domestic service, besides the avoid- 
 ance of stair- climbing where the suite of 
 rooms is all on one floor. It is not, however, 
 an ideal home for a family with small chil- 
 dren, and for their sake it is desirable to 
 
 118 
 
THE HOUSE OF TO-DAY 
 
 maintain the seclusion of the separate home, 
 while improving its conditions. 
 
 4. Economy. The modern house is far 
 more costly than it need be, through lack of 
 proper management. This applies first of 
 all to its purchases. The housekeeper of 
 earlier days laid in a large stock of neces- 
 saries of the sorts which would keep until 
 used, and thus was able to buy at low prices. 
 Such supplies now are usually bought in 
 small quantities and at high rates, because 
 we are paying the dealer for his time, trouble 
 and use of his capital. Losses also are in- 
 curred through unintelligent buying, as 
 inferior articles are passed off for the best, 
 and adulterated goods at the price of pure. 
 By the co-operation of several households 
 the services of an expert buyer could be had 
 on terms which would result in gain to all 
 of them. 
 
 The direct use of coal for heating and 
 
 119 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 cooking within the house involves great 
 waste. Most of the caloric we obtain from it 
 passes up the chimney, while coal-gas is 
 often discharged through the house. The 
 scientific use of coal under co-operative 
 arrangements would secure us both services 
 at far less cost, and would diminish the con- 
 sumption of this valuable mineral. 
 
 In the chapters which follow I shall try to 
 foresee the changes which are impending in 
 household management. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE HOUSE THAT Is To BE: ITS 
 ORGANIZATION 
 
 To avoid repetitions I shall not discuss 
 the methods of household reform in just the 
 order in which I have enumerated the evils 
 of which these are to rid us. I shall, how- 
 ever, cover the same ground in constructive 
 suggestion as I have in criticism. 
 
 It will be observed that in almost every 
 case the solution of our present difficulties 
 must be found in the application of co-opera- 
 tive method, to bring the families out of their 
 isolation into a plan of working together for 
 the relief of social burdens. Free co-opera- 
 tion, indeed, will be found to be the cor-? 
 rective of most of the evils on which the 
 Socialist rests his case for the overthrow 
 
 of the present order of society. And no- 
 121 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 where will its usefulness be more seen than 
 in the reconstruction of household relations. 
 
 1. Household service will cease to be a 
 matter of contract between a single house- 
 keeper and a single servant, and will become 
 one between a group of householders and a 
 staff of expert servants, through the agency 
 of a chartered corporation, or a co-operative 
 association. This agency will send its 
 workers to the houses in its field of action at 
 hours specified in the contract, to do what is 
 to be done, and then pass on to another 
 home of the group. They will be responsi- 
 ble, not to the house-mistress whose work 
 they do, but to the agency, which will hear 
 all complaints and act upon them. 
 
 Each corporation or association will repre- 
 sent families of about the same social class, 
 numerous enough to make its organization 
 worth while. But every family will be free 
 to withdraw from its agreement when the 
 
ITS ORGANIZATION 
 
 time that specifies has expired, and to seek 
 service elsewhere. 
 
 Of course each of these agencies, either 
 by itself or in co-operation with others, will 
 have a staff of extra workers including 
 possibly physicians and trained nurses who 
 can be summoned for an emergency by tele- 
 phone. And it may supply an exceptional 
 class, who will remain in the house overnight, 
 for such work as the care of infants. But 
 ordinarily the workers the agency supplies 
 will have their homes elsewhere. 
 
 The advantages of this plan over that now 
 in use, will be found to be manifold. 
 
 (a) It will be found more economical 
 than the hiring of servants for a single home. 
 It is nothing but the application to this field 
 of employment of the co-operative arrange- 
 ment, by which expense has been lightened 
 and service improved in every other. The 
 time was when the household which needed 
 
 123 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 the service of a physician, a musician, a 
 teacher, or even a barber, had to employ and 
 support a person who claimed expertness in 
 such things. My grandfather gave a man 
 a cottage on his property rent-free, on con- 
 dition that he would shave him every morn- 
 ing. And such arrangements, correspond- 
 ing somewhat to " feudal services," were not 
 unusual a hundred years ago. It is because 
 the application of the principle to the inti- 
 macies of family life is harder, that we still 
 keep servants of our own, instead of seeking 
 the service of experts, who would minister in 
 other households as well as our own. 
 
 (b) The gain to family privacy will be 
 great, when ordinarily the family will have 
 its home to itself, except at the hours when 
 it expects the attendance of these workers. 
 It was the demand for privacy which 
 abolished the old Hall, with its association 
 of the members of the " menie " both day 
 
 124 
 
ITS ORGANIZATION 
 
 and night. It was the same demand which 
 broke up the house into rooms, and gradu- 
 ally abolished the earlier tendency to gather 
 into groups for sleep and safety. And it 
 now demands the relief of the family from 
 the presence of alien and often hostile ele- 
 ments, and the substitution of workers who 
 will have their homes elsewhere. 
 
 (c) The efficiency of the service will be 
 much greater. The employing agency will 
 be able to secure the service of a much more 
 intelligent class of women than will consent 
 to live under the domestic rule which now 
 exists. They will accept the new arrange- 
 ment because it will leave them the control 
 of their time after their day's work is done; 
 it will place them under the direction of a 
 company, whose rules will be known before- 
 hand, and not extemporized from day to 
 day; and it will free them from the obliga- 
 
 125 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 tion to show the house-mistress other defer- 
 ence than simple, natural courtesy. 
 
 But to obtain and support this position, 
 they will have to acquire expertness in the 
 branch of service they accept. At present 
 only the rich are able to employ so many 
 servants that each may be required to be 
 expert in his (or her) proper work. Others 
 have to accept those who do many things 
 imperfectly, rather than one thing well. 
 But the new arrangement will secure for 
 them the advantage now confined to the 
 rich. 
 
 (d) The house-mistress will be set free 
 from a number of requirements which do 
 not properly belong to her position. She 
 will no longer have to select, train and super- 
 vise a number of work-people, and to see 
 them provided in the matter of food, lodg- 
 ing, health and good humor. She will enjoy 
 freedom from what is too often unfriendly 
 
 126 
 
ITS ORGANIZATION 
 
 observation, ministering to neighborhood 
 gossip. She will come into contact with a 
 superior class of women, and at specified 
 hours of the day. She will be able to give 
 herself to her proper work as the home- 
 maker, to the care of her children, and to the 
 comfort of her husband. 
 
 I am not unaware of the difficulties which 
 will beset the establishment and the admin- 
 istration of such an agency as this. At first, 
 no doubt there will be some friction, until 
 the purpose, the advantages and the limita- 
 tions of the plan are properly understood. 
 But both sides will learn to adjust them- 
 selves to the new order, and the supervising 
 authorities will obtain a chart of the rocks 
 they have to avoid. 
 
 Nor are there wanting indications that we 
 are already approaching a co-operative sys- 
 tem of this kind. In some of the towns of 
 New England one woman takes charge of 
 
 127 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 all the lamps in the homes ; another of all the 
 darning and mending; and so on. In several 
 great houses of New York the care of the 
 pictures, the bric-a-brac and the like, is put 
 into the hands of capable women, who serve 
 a number of families in this way. In our 
 cities generally it is usual to employ one man 
 to attend in several houses to work too rough 
 or too severe for the women servants. We 
 also have cleaning companies, who send 
 their experts when called by telephone, and 
 charge for this by the hour. It requires 
 but the unification and enlargement of such 
 methods to give us the agency for domestic 
 service. 
 
 2. Along with this reform will go such a 
 simplification of the work of the household 
 as will greatly reduce the amount of service 
 required. As I already have shown, a great 
 part of the progress of the home in its 
 adaptation to the natural family, has con- 
 
 128 
 
ITS ORGANIZATION 
 
 sisted in the removal of industries not essen- 
 tial to its comfort. Most are gone, but 
 several remain. 
 
 (a) The heating of the house is managed 
 in most cases by the burning of coal inside 
 the house, with bad results both to the health 
 of the inmates, and to the purse of the house- 
 holder. In America the Universities found 
 that they could not afford the waste this 
 involved, and they now are heated from a 
 central plant through all their buildings. In 
 several districts of our cities the same method 
 is employed, and also in some great indus- 
 trial establishments, where the business is 
 not such as to supply heat. The day will 
 come when not a piece of coal will be taken 
 into a private house, unless it is to be added 
 to a collection of minerals. 
 
 (b) The cooking of food must be taken 
 from the house, and conducted in large co- 
 
 9 129 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 operative kitchens, by men and not by 
 women. 
 
 This last point is essential. There has 
 been no greater blunder in our household 
 administration than the imposition of the 
 burden of cooking upon a sex, which has 
 no natural fitness for it. The preparation 
 of food in forms at once attractive to all our 
 senses, and wholesome for our sustenance, 
 is a scientific problem; and women have not 
 the scientific mind. They naturally take 
 hold of every such question by the personal 
 side. They give us not what will be best 
 for us, but what they know we will like the 
 best. Hence the wide diffusion of dyspepsia 
 in civilized countries. Hence also the com- 
 plaints of young husbands that their wives 
 do not come up to their mothers in the mak- 
 ing of toothsome things. In fact their 
 mothers had spoiled their digestions before 
 their wives got a fair show. 
 
 130 
 
ITS ORGANIZATION 
 
 History supports my contention here. On 
 the Egyptian monuments there are many 
 pictures of cooks at work, but never a 
 woman among them. In the Homeric poems 
 the Greek heroes prepare their banquets 
 with their own hands, even where there are 
 women within call. So of the Bible. 
 Abraham does not bid Sarah prepare a meal 
 for his three mysterious guests. He tells 
 her to make flour cakes for them, but he him- 
 self makes ready their repast (Genesis, xviii, 
 6-8 ) . An unnamed prophet of the time of 
 Manasseh indicates a farther extension of 
 masculine responsibility in the matter. He 
 makes Jehovah say, " I will wipe Jerusalem 
 as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and turn- 
 ing it upside down" (2 Kings, xxi, 13). 
 And even in modern times, when it is a. ques- 
 tion of cooking for a palace, an army, or a 
 great hotel, nobody thinks of calling in 
 women to do it. It always is a chef that is 
 
 131 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 employed; and there is no feminine of that 
 French noun. 
 
 Nor do women spontaneously undertake 
 to be cooks. The most zealous asserters of 
 female equality are modest at this point. In 
 a biographical dictionary of " Eminent 
 Women of the Nineteenth Century," edited 
 by women, not one is named who attained 
 eminence as a cook. In M. Vapereau's 
 " Dictionnaire des Contemporains " a good 
 number of men are described as eminent in 
 this field. Apicius, Vatal, Brillat-Savarin, 
 Savourin, Careme, Soyer, and the rest were 
 not of the gentler sex. 
 
 It has been objected that with the estab- 
 lishment of co-operative cooking, the family 
 meal will disappear, to the great loss of 
 sociability. There is no necessity for any 
 such loss. The new order can be so man- 
 aged as to secure both preference in the 
 choice of food, and its service at home at any 
 
 132 
 
ITS ORGANIZATION 
 
 hour that is desired, as warm and as palat- 
 able as at present. 
 
 This is made possible by a very simple 
 contrivance, which will keep food warm dur- 
 ing its transmission to almost any distance. 
 It is called in France the Norwegian kitchen, 
 and is used by the workingmen of Paris. It 
 consists of an outer tin can lined with felt 
 and an inner can which fits it closely. The 
 workman's wife puts his soup into the inner 
 can, and "brings it to the boil " on the fire. 
 She then shuts it into the outer can, where it 
 goes on cooking until her husband's dinner- 
 time. The Germans use the same contriv- 
 ance to economize fuel, and to secure slow 
 and thorough cooking. By an extension of 
 this contrivance, a dinner could be sent a 
 hundred miles without losing heat or flavor. 
 
 The co-operative kitchen will enable the 
 application of both science and economy to 
 the art of cooking. The work will be done 
 
 133 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 under the direction of an expert, who will 
 make purchases with regard to both quality 
 and price, and will buy in quantities which 
 will secure wholesale rates. He will demand 
 of his subordinates cleanliness, thoroughness, 
 and the watchfulness which will prevent the 
 ruin of food. The thermometer, the clock, 
 the scales and other instruments of precision 
 will control operations now done at hap- 
 hazard or by " rule of thumb." There will 
 be a scientific economy of fuel and of food- 
 materials, which probably will cover the costs 
 of administration. 
 
 This is not merely the suggestion of plans 
 unrealized. Already the method I propose 
 has been tested. In Bergen (Norway) co- 
 operative cooking has been in use for the 
 working-people for a generation past. They 
 can no longer afford to have their cooking 
 done in their own houses, just as they can- 
 not afford to have their clothing spun and 
 
 134 
 
ITS ORGANIZATION 
 
 woven at home. There also have been suc- 
 cessful experiments in Mobile and in some 
 places in the West Indias, the late Dr. John 
 Fulton told me. There is, indeed, a record 
 of failures, each of them due to the fact that 
 the experiment was left in the hands of 
 women. 
 
 The disappearance of the domestic kitchen 
 will be a notable relief to the house-mistress, 
 relieving her from responsibility for burnt 
 food, ill-served dishes, and the endless series 
 of disasters attendant in so many cases on 
 domestic cooking. Especially great will be 
 the boon to the wife of the working-man, 
 who now is compelled to do her cooking her- 
 self. Philadelphia is justly proud of the 
 myriads of small houses, built by her work- 
 ing people through their building associa- 
 tions, and amounting in value to one-fifth 
 of her realty. But in the rear of every 
 house is a room nearly filled by a cooking- 
 
 135 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 stove, where the mistress of the house de- 
 stroys her health, temper and good looks in 
 wasting fuel and food. Yet one co-opera- 
 tive kitchen would do the work for several 
 blocks of such houses, in an intelligent and 
 wholesome way. 
 
 What shall we say of the waste involved in 
 the activity of 150,000 such kitchens, great 
 and small, in such a city, each of them pour- 
 ing up its chimney all but a fraction of the 
 caloric contained in the coal they consume? 
 If we had a thousand men under arms to 
 feed, and were to set up two hundred 
 kitchens to do it, we should be thought in- 
 sane. Yet for every thousand in a city, we 
 have that number, and more. 
 
 Yet I have heard men say that " if you 
 take the cooking out of the home, you have 
 taken out the comfort!" So their grand- 
 mothers felt about taking the spinning out 
 of the house. So others have felt about 
 
 136 
 
ITS ORGANIZATION 
 
 every change that has been made for the 
 improvement of the home. Nor do I find 
 this altogether blameworthy. It is a whole- 
 some instinct which makes us reluctant to 
 leave a home we have long occupied to be- 
 take ourselves to another, even if it be a 
 better. It is a foretaste of the great shrink- 
 ing from that removal from life to life, 
 which we all must undergo. So the passage 
 from one style of home to another must have 
 been attended by a. struggle at every stage, 
 between men's instincts and their judgment. 
 Only a small minority of men, indeed, 
 have been led by their judgments to choose 
 the better, and having drunk the old wine, 
 to presently desire the new. The majority, 
 as Sir Henry Sumner Maine says, "have 
 stereotyped their institutions." They have 
 called a halt at an early stage of the great 
 march of civilization, and beyond this they 
 will not move. They feel about changes 
 from worse to better, as a man might feel, 
 
 1ST 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 whom you had wakened out of a deep sleep 
 to put a softer pillow under his head. 
 
 But " the better is the enemy of the good;" 
 and the people who have come thus far in the 
 upward march, will not stop where they are. 
 Our " comfort," which often means no more 
 than contentment with what we are used to 
 seeing and having, will not suffice as a motive 
 for stopping the march, especially when so 
 much is at stake. 
 
 More worthy of attention is the objection 
 that " there will be nothing left for women 
 to do," after these changes have been 
 wrought. Everything will be left, which 
 belongs to woman's functions as mother, 
 sister and wife. She will have the oppor- 
 tunity to become more truly the home-maker 
 of the race, when she no longer has to enlist 
 a body of servants, to supervise their work, 
 and to carry on some half-dozen of trades, 
 which can be better attended to outside the 
 house. She will have more time to give to 
 
 138 
 
ITS ORGANIZATION 
 
 her children, in that great education which 
 precedes the school, and on which that of the 
 school and of life so much depends. She 
 will no longer leave to schools and to school- 
 teachers what should be her joy the train- 
 ing of her children in morals and manners. 
 She will have time to keep herself abreast of 
 her husband in knowledge of what the world 
 is doing, and in acquaintance of the best that 
 has been said by the wisest men. She will 
 no longer dismiss the larger interests of life 
 with the assumption of the wedding-ring. 
 She will have something else to talk of than 
 the worries of domestic management, of 
 which he soon grows sick and tired. She 
 will have time for social duties, especially 
 toward her actual neighbors, rich and poor, 
 whom she is fitted to aid and comfort. She 
 will have room to be more of a woman and 
 less of a drudge than society at present 
 allows her to be. 
 
 139 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE HOUSE THAT Is To BE: ITS 
 EQUIPMENT 
 
 1. THE cleaning of the house is a matter 
 which concerns health, comfort and economy. 
 It is in modern times only that the impor- 
 tance of this has been recognized; but even 
 we have been very slow to apply the methods 
 which mechanical science has put within 
 reach. 
 
 The carpet-sweeper was the first applica- 
 tion of mechanism to the task, and it left 
 much to be desired. The besom, the broom, 
 the feather-duster, and the like, all belong 
 to one stock, and exhibit the same defects. 
 They leave nearly as much dirt behind as 
 they remove; and they often do more harm 
 than good by transferring a great portion 
 of the dust from the floor we walk on to the 
 air we breathe. 
 
 140 
 
ITS EQUIPMENT 
 
 The suggestion of cleaning by an exhaust 
 apparatus, or by suction, was made by an 
 obscure inventor more than half a century 
 ago, and nothing came of it. It was sug- 
 gested more recently by the application of 
 the exhaust method in some processes of 
 manufacture. Thus the fine particles of sand 
 and steel, which are ground off in sharpening 
 cutlery on a grindstone, are drawn into an 
 exhaust-chamber, and the steel separated 
 from the sand by magnets, that it may be 
 worked over again. So in cotton-factories 
 the " flowings " of the cotton are drawn off 
 in the same way, and utilized. 
 
 My experience as a university librarian in 
 the early years of 1870-80 led me to desire 
 some such apparatus for the cleaning of the 
 books. I began to advocate cleaning by 
 suction for both homes and libraries, and 
 even streets, in my public lectures. This 
 was regarded at first as a fad of no practical 
 
 141 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 value. But now the method has come into 
 large use, though on a limited scale. Like 
 Dr. Edward Everett Hale, I begin to re- 
 gard myself as " one of the minor prophets, 
 a very minor prophet!" 1 
 
 The new Congressional Library at Wash- 
 ington realizes my dream by cleaning its 
 books by an exhaust apparatus. Several 
 of our large railroads use it in cleaning their 
 passenger-cars. And at last it has come 
 into use for cleaning houses in the cities of 
 Germany and America, in two ways. In 
 the first a big automobile is run to the front 
 of the house, and flexible rubber tubes are 
 introduced through the windows of the 
 
 1 Dr. Hale's claim was based on a sentence in his " Sybaris 
 and Other Homes" (1869), in which he makes his Colonel 
 Ingham say that when the street-cars of that admirable city 
 have received their proper number of passengers, the 
 mules are detached, and the cars are conveyed to their 
 destination by power supplied from a central engine. A 
 gentleman interested in street-cars wrote to Dr. Hale 
 to ask how it was done, and received the answer that 
 Colonel Ingham had not explained that. 
 142 
 
ITS EQUIPMENT 
 
 second story. Through these the exhaust 
 pumps outside draw off the dust and loose 
 dirt from every part of the house in turn, 
 and it is carried off for use in florists' seed- 
 beds. The second method applies the ex- 
 haust process to a smaller apparatus, oper- 
 ated by an electric current within the house 
 itself. Where no such current is obtainable,, 
 other machines offer to supply the power 
 by the labor of hand or foot ; but this is toil- 
 some, and hardly efficient. 
 
 These devices are but prophecies of better 
 things yet to come. They enable us to look 
 forward with confidence to a time when this 
 method of cleaning will be applied to the 
 homes and the streets of a whole city, just 
 as in the supply of water. This, of course, 
 would require a general and permanent sys- 
 tem of piping, to connect every room in the 
 houses with powerful exhaust engines out- 
 side the city. When a room is to be cleaned, 
 us 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 the operator will connect these metal pipes 
 with a flexible tube, terminating in a proper 
 metal mouthpiece, and, by going over every 
 point, send the dust not only out of the house, 
 but out of town. 
 
 The location of the sites of these ex- 
 haustion-engines will be a matter of impor- 
 tance. There are few cities which have not 
 in their neighborhood places of low grade 
 and damp soil, where the dust might be used 
 to level the surface, and enable the use of 
 the new level for the erection of buildings, 
 after thorough drainage. The utilization of 
 this arch-enemy dust, this by-product of 
 our civilization, to extend the city instead of 
 burying it, would be a great gain to most of 
 our cities. The flats we pass in approaching 
 New York from the southwest, for instance, 
 are at present hopeless. It is said that 
 Horace Greeley spent nights in studying 
 them, to ascertain the possibility of utilizing 
 
 144 
 
ITS EQUIPMENT 
 
 them as sites for homes for. the workingmen. 
 But if the dust and loose dirt of the city, 
 instead of being thrown into the sea, were 
 to be used in raising those flats above tide 
 water, within forty years the problem would 
 be solved. 
 
 The streets of our cities undergo an opera- 
 tion called cleaning which leaves them almost 
 as dirty as before it is done. Mostly it is 
 with brooms and scrapers, and a consider- 
 able amount of dirt is removed; but it is 
 hardly missed when the wind blows, after a 
 drying period, and the dust whirls along 
 into our houses, our eyes and our throats. 
 Nor is anything better effected by the use 
 of mechanical brushes, fastened to a frame- 
 work drawn by horses. These are meant 
 to bring the dirt from the centre of the 
 street to the gutters, and thus facilitate its 
 removal. It would not be fair to say they 
 do no good ; but it is certain that they do not 
 give us clean streets. 
 
 10 145 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 What we need here also is the application 
 of the exhaust-engine to the streets as well 
 as the houses. By a steady application of 
 this we might make our streets the envy of 
 the country-folk, with their dusty roads and 
 muddy lanes. But this would require the 
 entire banishment of the horse from the city. 
 Our asphalt pavements have made us see 
 the extent to which that quadruped is a con- 
 tributor to the refuse of our streets. 
 
 I do not speak with the same confidence in 
 suggesting that the exhaust engine might be 
 applied to the ventilation of our city houses. 
 It has been used with success to the supply 
 of fresh air to many business houses and 
 offices; and it might be so used through the 
 whole city. The reduction of fires to the 
 number required for co-operative cooking, 
 heating and the generation of power, and the 
 prevention of waste in these by the scientific 
 use of coal, would go far to purify the air 
 
 146 
 
ITS EQUIPMENT 
 
 of our cities from the noxious gases gener- 
 ated in our waste of that mineral. The ex- 
 tent to which we now suffer from this is in- 
 dicated by the fretting and darkening of 
 marble fronts, even where no smoke has 
 been affecting them directly. Yet under the 
 new conditions it might be advisable to erect 
 a tall chimney at the centre of every block 
 of houses, and to bring down fresh air into 
 the houses, from a higher and cooler stratum. 
 
 2. The supply of electric force to the city 
 house falls far short of what is possible and 
 desirable. 
 
 (a) The sewing-machine is still worked 
 by the operator's hand or foot, mostly the 
 latter. The result is often injurious to her 
 health, especially when everything below the 
 table-board is made of iron. She is then 
 employing the heat of her body in warming 
 this mass of cold metal. I may add in pass- 
 ing that the same objection applies to school 
 
 147 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 desks and seats, in whose construction iron 
 is freely used. They should be of wood 
 throughout, as are those of our Philadelphia 
 high schools. 
 
 (6) The substitution of the safety lift (or 
 elevator) for the staircase will require a sup- 
 ply of electric force. At present the elevator 
 is associated in many minds with ugly and 
 even fatal accidents. Hardly one of these 
 but might have been avoided by such a con- 
 struction of machinery, as is seen in the 
 safety elevators of continental Europe. The 
 type of elevator there evolved is less slow 
 than the English lift, and less rapid than the 
 American flyer. It seems to reduce risk to 
 the vanishing point. 
 
 Woman especially will have reason to be 
 gratified by the substitution of the elevator 
 for the staircase. On her falls mainly the 
 business of climbing from story to story, in 
 the management of her house. Whether 
 
 148 
 
ITS EQUIPMENT 
 
 with or without a burden, she is unfitted by 
 her physiological structure for that sort of 
 effort. 
 
 (c) The electric fan has come into exten- 
 sive use for cooling offices and other places 
 of business, but not largely for that service 
 in houses. The usefulness of the ordinary 
 fan as a cooler is discounted somewhat by 
 the generation of bodily heat in the exercise. 
 The electric fan avoids this. Something of 
 the same sort is needed in churches and other 
 places of assemblage in summer, but less in 
 evidence and less clumsy than the punkah 
 used in the East. 
 
 (d) The introduction of the telephone 
 into our houses has been not only a great 
 convenience, but a promotion of mental 
 health. The solitary farmhouses of Great 
 Britain and America, by isolating the 
 women who reside in them from human fel- 
 lowship through a large part of the working 
 
 149 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 day, do much harm. It is said that more 
 wives and daughters of farmers lose their 
 reason, than do women of any other class. 
 But a notable change has been wrought by 
 the telephone, which enables a woman to 
 talk with her friends and neighbors without 
 leaving her house. In many parts of 
 America the whole body of houses in a 
 neighborhood often is equipped with this 
 beneficent instrument. It is said for in- 
 stance, that every house on Block Island is 
 furnished with a telephone, so that in the 
 bleakest winter its people can talk freely 
 with any one on the island. In our cities the 
 use of the telephone advances rapidly, but 
 we are still far from having this universal 
 enjoyment of it, and the public " pay-tele- 
 phones " indicate this. Here is room for an 
 improvement of no small importance. 
 
 Nor are the uses of the electric wire to the 
 family to be confined to private messages 
 
 150 
 
ITS EQUIPMENT 
 
 from neighbor to neighbor. A recent inven- 
 tion makes it possible to establish in every 
 house a music room, in which its inmates 
 may enjoy at any hour of the afternoon and 
 evening whatever quality of music they pre- 
 fer, as played at that time by a competent 
 musician at a musical centre. 
 
 A telephonic device for transmission of 
 the news has been introduced recently for 
 the service of the blind. May not the day 
 come when the march of improvement will 
 have rendered the newspaper obsolete for 
 those who see, by repeating to us at the 
 breakfast table the really important facts 
 of the world's happenings? 
 
 These are a part only of the mechanical 
 changes for the better adaptation of the 
 House to the needs of the Family, to which 
 we may look forward. They probably will 
 meet with less resistance than will the social 
 changes advocated in the previous chapter. 
 
 151 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 The modern world is less sceptical of me- 
 chanical than of social progress. 
 
 The two together should make housekeep- 
 ing more attractive and less costly to the 
 coming generations. They certainly will 
 have the advantage of enabling those genera- 
 tions to ascertain in advance, and with more 
 exactness, the actual cost of having a home, 
 and thus remove an uncertainty which is 
 more deterrent than any foreseen drawback. 
 Thus the social drift toward the apartment- 
 house will be diverted to a more wholesome 
 home-life, with its privacy and its substan- 
 tial joys. No greater social service could 
 be rendered to the modern world. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE STREETS OF THE FUTURE 
 
 As has appeared more than once from the 
 history I have given of the House, it is not 
 possible to regard it as independent of its 
 surroundings. This is especially true of the 
 town-house, whose relations with the street 
 on which it stands, are intimate and 
 important. 
 
 1. The present facilities for rapid travel 
 make it a question whether there is any need 
 to build the residential districts of a large 
 city in the compact order which has been 
 usual hitherto. When William Penn laid 
 out Philadelphia, on a suggestion taken 
 from the account of Babylon in Herodotus, 
 he planned that every house should be 
 placed in a garden, so that the citizens should 
 not forfeit the advantages of the country life 
 
 153 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 in the matter of fresh air and the com- 
 panionship of the trees and plants. The 
 plan was impossible under such conditions 
 as arose when the city became an important 
 port of entry. But the suggestion might 
 well be heeded in the erection of new cities 
 under modern conditions. 
 
 It ought to be possible for the greater part 
 of the city's population to live within easy 
 reach of their places of business, and yet in 
 the rural atmosphere, which means whole- 
 some air and soothing quiet during the hours 
 of sleep. This is now the privilege of the 
 comparatively wealthy, and is probably the 
 most solid advantage that riches bring them. 
 But there is no reason for a monopoly of it 
 by them. Their search for fresh and peace- 
 ful surroundings is but the expression of a 
 popular instinct, which stirs in all of us, and 
 which will find a reasonable gratification in 
 the future. At present it is pathetic to 
 
 154 
 
STREETS OF THE FUTURE 
 
 watch the first contact with the country 
 which many city children obtain in the 
 " country- week " holidays now devised for 
 them. 
 
 Until that change comes more pains 
 should be taken to diminish the drawbacks 
 of life among our " Saharas of brick and 
 mortar," as Carlyle called London. The in- 
 crease of open spaces, and especially of play- 
 grounds for the children of the city, is now 
 recognized as a public necessity. London 
 has more than three hundred of these, 
 mostly old churchyards cleared of their 
 tombstones, levelled, and equipped with a 
 simple gymnastic apparatus. The larger 
 American cities have been moving in the 
 same direction, and New York has led the 
 way in converting house-roofs into play- 
 grounds. 
 
 The lining of the streets with trees 
 seems to have been another of William 
 
 155 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 Penn's ideas, and Philadelphia was once 
 known as "the sylvan city'" for this reason, 
 and because its leading streets took the 
 names of the trees. Hence Longfellow's 
 beautiful reference 
 
 In that delightful land, which is washed by the 
 
 Delaware's waters, 
 Guarding in sylvan shades the name of Penn the 
 
 apostle, 
 Stands on the banks of its beautiful stream the 
 
 city he founded. 
 There all the air is balm, and the peach is the 
 
 emblem of beauty. 
 And the streets still re-echo the names of the trees 
 
 of the forest, 
 As if they fain would appease the Dryads whose 
 
 haunts they molested. 
 
 But the encroachment of electric wires, 
 and the cutting off the natural supply of 
 water by asphalt pavements, have denuded 
 our streets generally. The Japanese am- 
 pelopsis serves to alleviate the glare from 
 
 156 
 
STREETS OF THE FUTURE 
 
 heated walls, and supplies the element of 
 natural beauty ; but it is not commonly used 
 where it is most needed, in the poorer parts 
 of the city. Every green leaf within a city 
 is a means of freshening the air, and com- 
 forting humanity. 
 
 2. The substitution of automobile travel 
 and conveyance of goods, for the use of 
 horses, is not yet complete; but it advances 
 so rapidly as to indicate that this is to be 
 the only means of transportation in the near 
 future. This will require great modifica- 
 tions in the densely peopled parts of the 
 city. It will make the streets increasingly 
 difficult to foot-passengers, especially to the 
 timid and the aged. Already they are 
 almost as perilous as the tracks of a crowded 
 railroad, and they are sure to grow worse. 
 
 The remedy I would suggest is the trans- 
 fer of the sidewalks to the second story of 
 the houses throughout the closely built dis- 
 
 157 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 tricts. Watergate Row in Chester is an in- 
 stance of this arrangement, and the beauty 
 of the old houses, constructed in this way to 
 escape the marauding raids of the Welsh in 
 the Middle Ages, shows that the plan would 
 not interfere with fine architectural effects. 
 For our modern need, we should have to 
 connect these elevated sidewalks with 
 bridges at the crossing of streets, while at 
 every corner there would be a landing-place 
 to enable foot-passengers to come down to 
 the street level, to reach an electric car or 
 an automobile. An additional advantage 
 would be the protection of the sidewalk by 
 the projecting third story, making foot- 
 passengers independent of the weather; 
 while the travelling machines on the street 
 could move at any rate of speed consistent 
 with the avoidance of collisions. 
 
 3. The proper pavement for the streets of 
 a city is still a moot-point. The Macadam- 
 
 158 
 
STREETS OF THE FUTURE 
 
 ized road was by no means the worst, but it 
 is now impossible through the raising of 
 dust by automobiles. The cobble-stone 
 pavement is still older, and vastly worse, 
 having long been the torture of horses, and 
 the discomfort of men, in the time when it 
 extended to the sidewalks as well as the road. 
 "Belgian blocks" of granite have not ful- 
 filled the prophecy of their friends, as they 
 are severe on horses, and are apt to grow 
 rough and irregular. Bricks placed edge- 
 wise are too slippery in frosty weather, and 
 like granite are always inelastic. Asphalt 
 has many merits, among others that it makes 
 street barricades difficult if not impossible, 
 as was foreseen by M. Haussmann when he 
 laid it on the streets of Paris. But it is 
 deadly to trees, reflects the glare of the sun 
 as does a brick wall, and is also hard on 
 horses' feet. Thus far wood-blocks set in 
 tar appear the best material in sight, and 
 
 159 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 have stood severe tests on both sides of the 
 Atlantic. They also have the merit of being 
 less noisy: the reduction of noise in our 
 streets is one of our most urgent necessities. 
 
 Any kind of street pavement might very 
 well be supplemented by flat metal plates at 
 the distance which now separates car-rails, 
 each curving downward at the centre just 
 enough to make wheels stay in them, but not 
 enough to subject axles to a strain in turn- 
 ing out. These would take the place of the 
 heavy and ugly rails now used by the street- 
 car lines, which break the surface of the 
 street far more than is necessary. 
 
 4. The sewers of a great city, as Victor 
 Hugo shows us of Paris, form a world by 
 themselves. This generally has been a world 
 rife with perils to those who live in the day- 
 light world above them, both through the 
 generation and diffusion of noisome gases, 
 and through their serving as the home of 
 
 160 
 
STREETS OF THE FUTURE 
 
 countless rats. These evils are so great, and 
 so much connected with the diffusion of 
 epidemics, that some even have expressed 
 their preference for the old-fashioned sewer, 
 which ran down the middle of the open 
 street. 
 
 The city of the future will have to deal 
 with this under- street system more vigor- 
 ously than in the past. It will see that its 
 refuse is carried swiftly and harmlessly to 
 its destination, and transformed into a fer- 
 tilizer. But this need not be the only use to 
 which this underground passage shall be put. 
 Electric wires of all sorts, gas-pipes, and 
 the like, should be placed there, so as to be 
 reached easily for repairs, and to avoid tear- 
 ing up the streets for alterations of any 
 kind. Thus will disappear the unsightly 
 tangle of overhead wires telephonic, tele- 
 graphic and dynamic which now disfigure 
 many of our cities. And by the city's ex- 
 
 11 161 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 haust engines the sewers will be cleared of 
 sewer-gas, which often is almost the despair 
 of the architect and the plumber. 
 
 Such suggestions might be prolonged to 
 much greater length, but I have already 
 sketched what to many may seem a revolu- 
 tionary programme. It would be so, if all 
 these things were undertaken at once. They 
 belong to a vista of gradual alterations, 
 which will bring about not only the comfort 
 of the few, but the common advantage of all. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 No external feature of man's life is more 
 important to his growth in character and 
 comfort than is his home. This is the space 
 enclosed from the world, within which love 
 works its miracles, as the old wizard drew 
 the magic circle around him, before he under- 
 took to work wonders. Here men learned 
 the law of mutual service and kindly help, 
 when all out of doors was full of conflict, 
 rapine, and cruelty. Here the domestic 
 pets, the dog and the cat, entered the circle 
 of human interest as the poor relations of 
 our race. Here the kindly ministrations of 
 fire and water began. The former espe- 
 cially marked our human dignity in the 
 mastery of what was a terror to every other 
 form of animate life, but to us a faithful 
 servant. The great Hellenic myth of 
 
 163 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven for 
 the sake of man, marks the sense men had 
 of the value of this ennobling gift. Men 
 alone kindle and feed the fire; and for ages 
 the fireside was but another name for home. 
 And the most progressive of mankind 
 hardly can escape the feeling that something 
 was lost through its disappearance from 
 modern arrangements. 
 
 But change is the law of life, on our 
 planet at least. Some welcome it; some re- 
 sist it; all must bow to it. The Arabs have 
 a mythical tale of Chidher the Ever- Young, 
 which Friedrich Riickert has rendered into 
 beautiful German verse. I give it in the 
 good yet not quite adequate translation of 
 the late Moncton Milnes, the first Lord 
 Houghton: 
 
 Chidher the Prophet, ever young, 
 Thus loosed the bridle of his tongue. 
 164 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 I journeyed by a goodly town, . 
 
 Beset with many a garden fair, 
 
 And asked with one who gathered down 
 
 Large fruit, how long the town was there. 
 
 He spoke, nor chose his hand to stay 
 
 " The town has stood for many a day, 
 
 And will be here forever and aye." 
 
 A thousand years went by and then 
 I went the selfsame road again. 
 
 No vestige of that town I traced, 
 
 But one poor swain his horn employed 
 
 His sheep unconscious browsed and grazed; 
 
 I asked, "When was that town destroyed? 1 
 
 He spoke, nor would his horn lay by, 
 
 " One thing may grow and another die, 
 
 But I know nothing of towns not I." 
 
 A thousand years went by, and then 
 I passed the selfsame place again. 
 
 There in the deep of waters cast 
 His nets one lonely fisherman, 
 And as he drew them up at last, 
 I asked him how that lake began. 
 He looked at me and laughed to say, 
 " The waters spring forever and aye, 
 And fish are plenty every day." 
 165 
 
THE DWELLING-HOUSE 
 
 A thousand years went by, and then 
 I went the selfsame road again. 
 
 I found a country wild and rude, 
 And, axe in hand, beside a tree, 
 The hermit of that solitude. 
 I asked how old that wood might be. 
 He spoke, " I count not time at all, 
 A tree may rise, a tree may fall, 
 The forest overlives us all." 
 
 A thousand years went on, and then 
 I passed the selfsame place again. 
 
 And there a .glorious city stood, 
 
 And mid tumultuous market-cry, 
 
 I asked when rose the town, where wood, 
 
 Pasture and lake forgotten lie. 
 
 They heard me not, and little blame 
 
 For them the world is as it came, 
 
 And all things must be still the same. 
 
 A thousand years shall pass, and then 
 I mean to try that road again. 
 
 History is Chidher the ever young. Its 
 message is that what we have come to regard 
 
 166 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 as permanent features of our lives, is the 
 outcome of a development, which has its 
 roots in the remote past, but which will not 
 stay its growth so long as men reach out to 
 what is better and higher than they have. 
 And in no field of human life is this more 
 clearly shown than in the evolution of the 
 dwelling-house from the primitive tree or 
 cave, to the palace. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Africa, 21 
 
 America's old houses, 10, 66, 
 
 68, 91 
 Apartment houses, 118, 119, 
 
 152 
 
 Baeda, 41 
 
 Baths and bath-houses, 52-54, 
 
 93-95 
 
 Beds, 22, 45, 48, 64, 65, 90, 91 
 Belfry (Berkfriet), 46, 47 
 Bellows, John, 26 
 Bible: 
 
 Ecclesiastes, 107 
 
 Genesis, 19, 131 
 
 Hosea, 58 
 
 Jeremiah, 27 
 
 Joshua, 108 
 
 2. Kings, 131 
 Bower, 48-52, 92 
 Brooke, Stopford, 41 
 Building associations, 135 
 Burgomaster's stone, 74, 75 
 Burmah, 22 
 
 Caedmon, 41, 42 
 
 Candles and candle-grease, 77, 
 
 100 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 9, 13, 155 
 
 Carpentry, 65-68 
 
 Chaffering of buyer and seller, 
 
 78, 79 
 
 Chaucer, 51, 52, 66, 67 
 Chester, 158 
 Chidher the Ever-young, 164- 
 
 166 
 
 Child, importance of the, 18, 19 
 Chimney, 58-62, 79 
 Cleaning by suction, 140-147 
 Clocks and watches, 88, 89 
 Cooking, 52, 53, 77, 92, 93, 
 
 111-113, 129-136 
 Co-operation, 119-121, 128- 
 
 130 
 
 Dasent, Sir George Webbe, 36 
 Denmark, 81, 82, 87 
 Dust, 108, 109, 140, 143-145 
 Dutch cleanliness, 76, 80, 81, 
 101 
 
 Economy in house-keeping, 
 
 119, 120, 123, 124 
 Education, 39, 40, 69, 139 
 Egyptian monuments, 131 
 Electric power, 147-151, 157, 
 
 158, 161 
 Erasmus, 81 
 
 169 
 
INDEX 
 
 Tacitus, 72 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 62 
 Telephones, 123, 149-151 
 Telford, Thomas, 103 
 Teutonic loyalty, 34 
 Thomson, James, 67 
 Towns, 72-104 
 Town-halls, 84 
 
 Town-Middens, 75, 76, 80, 107 
 Tree-dwellers, 19-23 
 Tradesmen, 86, 89 
 their signs, 74 
 
 Ulysses, the bed of, 22 
 Vapereau, Gustave, 132 
 
 Ventilation, 65, 106, 107, 146- 
 147 
 
 Viollet-Leduc, Eugene Emman- 
 uel, 85 
 
 Vitruvius, 59 
 
 Washing-day, 95 
 Water, 93, 98, 99 
 West Indies, 135 
 Windows, 30, 39, 63, 87, 88, 
 
 105, 110 
 Woman's work, 39, 48, 49, 77, 
 
 97, 98, 138, 139 
 Workshops, 69, 77-79, 89 
 
 Xenophon, 28, 108 
 
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