tairs; the sex likes to be
safely housed against burglars, and when it must be left alone, it
desires the security of neighbors, however strange the neighbors may be;
it likes the authority of a janitor, the society of an elevator-boy. It
hates a lower door, an area, an ash-barrel, and a back yard. But if it
were willing to confront all these inconveniences, it is intimately, it
is osseously, convinced that a house is not cheaper than a flat. As a
matter of fact, neither a house nor a flat is cheap enough in New York
to bear me out in my theory that New York is no more expensive than
those Old World cities. To aid efficiently in my support I must invoke
the prices of provisions, which I find, by inquiry at several markets on
the better avenues, have reverted to the genial level of the earlier
nineteen-hundreds, before the cattle combined with the trusts to send
them up. I won't prosily rehearse the quotations of beef, mutton, pork,
poultry, and fish; they can be had at any dealer's on demand; and they
will be found less, on the whole, than in London, less than in Paris,
less even than in Rome. They are greater no doubt than the prices in our
large Western cities, but they are twenty per cent. less than the prices
in Boston, and in the New England towns which hang upon Boston's favor
for their marketing. I do not know how or why it is that while we wicked
New-Yorkers pay twenty-five cents for our beefsteak, these righteous
Bostonians should have to pay thirty, for the same cut and quality. Here
I give twenty-eight a pound for my Java coffee; in the summer I live
near an otherwise delightful New Hampshire town where I must give
thirty-eight. It is strange that the siftings of three kingdoms, as the
Rev. Mr. Higginson called his fellow-Puritans, should have come in their
great-grandchildren to a harder fate in this than the bran and shorts
and middlings of such harvestings as the fields of Ireland and Italy, of
Holland and Hungary, of Poland and Transylvania and Muscovy afford.
Perhaps it is because those siftings have run to such a low percentage
of the whole New England population that they must suffer, along with
the refuse of the mills--the Mills of the Gods--abounding in our city
and its dependencies.

"I don't know how much our housekeepers note the fall of the prices in
their monthly bills, but in browsing about for my meals, as I rather
like to do, I distinctly see it in the restaurant rates. I don't mean
the resta