plete disregard of fitness. The other evening, in leaving my
rooms, I brushed against a portly person in the half-light of the
corridor. There was a shimmer of (what appeared to my inexperienced eyes
as) costly stuffs, a huge hat crowned the shadow itself, "topped by
nodding plumes," which seemed to account for the depleted condition of my
feather duster.

I found on inquiring of the janitor, that the dressy person I had met,
was the char-woman in street attire, and that a closet was set aside in
the building, for the special purpose of her morning and evening
transformations, which she underwent in the belief that her social
position in Avenue A would suffer, should she appear in the streets
wearing anything less costly than seal-skin and velvet or such imitations
of those expensive materials as her stipend would permit.

I have as tenants of a small wooden house in Jersey City, a bank clerk,
his wife and their three daughters. He earns in the neighborhood of
fifteen hundred dollars a year. Their rent (with which, by the way, they
are always in arrears) is three hundred dollars. I am favored spring and
autumn by a visit from the ladies of that family, in the hope (generally
futile) of inducing me to do some ornamental papering or painting in
their residence, subjects on which they have by experience found my agent
to be unapproachable. When those four women descend upon me, I am fairly
dazzled by the splendor of their attire, and lost in wonder as to how the
price of all that finery can have been squeezed out of the twelve
remaining hundreds of their income. When I meet the father he is shabby
to the outer limits of the genteel. His hat has, I am sure, supported
the suns and snowstorms of a dozen seasons. There is a threadbare shine
on his apparel that suggests a heartache in each whitened seam, but the
ladies are mirrors of fashion, as well as moulds of form. What can
remain for any creature comforts after all those fine clothes have been
paid for? And how much is put away for the years when the long-suffering
money maker will be past work, or saved towards the time when sickness or
accident shall appear on the horizon? How those ladies had the "nerve"
to enter a ferry boat or crowd into a cable car, dressed as they were,
has always been a marvel to me. A landau and two liveried servants would
barely have been in keeping with their appearance.

Not long ago, a great English nobleman, who is also famous i