h the
newness, the wholesomeness, and handiness of an American flat, the rent
is not so much greater than that of a European flat, with its elementary
bareness. You could not, here, unless you descended from the apartment
to the tenement, hire any quarter where you would not be supplied with
hot and cold water, with steam heating, with a bath-room, and all the
rest of it."

"But," we said, "you are showing that we are more comfortably housed
than the Europeans, when you should be treating the fact of relative
cheapness."

"I was coming to that even in the matter of housing--"

"It is too late to come to it in this paper. You have now talked three
thousand words, and that is the limit. You must be silent for at least
another month."

"But if I have something important to say at this juncture? If I may not
care to recur to the subject a month hence? If I may have returned to
Europe by that time?"

"Then you can the better verify your statistics. But the rule in this
place is inflexible. Three thousand words, neither more nor less. The
wisdom of Solomon would be blue-pencilled if it ran to more."

XI

WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK

The Howadji, or the Hajii, us people called his sort in the days of
_Home as Found_, was prompt to the hour when his month's absence was up,
and he began without a moment's delay: "But of course the lion in the
way of my thesis that New York is comparatively cheap is the rent, the
rent of flats or houses in the parts of the town where people of gentle
tastes and feelings are willing to live. Provisions are cheap;
furnishings of all kinds are cheap; service, especially when you mainly
or wholly dispense with it, is cheap, for one maid here will do the work
of two abroad, and if the mistress of the house does her own work she
can make the modern appliances her handmaids at no cost whatever. It is
ridiculous, in fact, leaving all those beautiful and ingenious helps in
housework to the hirelings who work only twice as hard with them for
more wages than the hirelings of countries where they don't exist."

"Don't be so breathless," we interposed. "You will only be allowed to
talk three thousand words, whether you talk fast or slow, and you might
as well take your ease."

"That is true," the Howadji reflected. "But I am full of my subject, and
I have the feeling that I am getting more out, even if I can't get more
in, by talking fast. The rent question itself," he hurried on