ving-rooms are
almost always on the ground-floor, both on account of the fatigue of
going up and down stairs, and owing to the paucity of servants. As a
rule, the kitchens are terribly small, and in summer filled with flies.
How the poor servants manage to exist in them is more than I can
understand. It is no wonder they ask such high wages. In a few larger
houses a merciful fashion has been adopted of making the kitchen a mere
cooking galley, the cook preparing the dishes and doing all that does not
require the presence of fire in a large back-kitchen. Happily every house
has a bath-room, though it is often only a mere shed of wood or
galvanized iron put up in the back-yard. In many of the poorer households
this shed does double duty as bath-house and wash-house, or the
wash-house consists of a couple of boards, with a post to keep them up,
and a piece of netting overhead to keep the sun off. In larger houses,
both bath-rooms and wash-houses are much the same as in England. Nearly
all families do their washing, and often their ironing also, at home. Of
the sanitary arrangements, it is almost impossible to speak too strongly;
they are almost invariably objectionable and disgusting.

There are very few establishments large enough to indulge in the luxury
of a servants'-hall, and sculleries and pantries are much smaller than in
England. Even the ordinary entrance-hall of an English house has to
shrink into a mere enlargement of the passage. All over the house, in
fact, the accommodation is on a much more limited scale, unless it be
with regard to stables, which, owing to the low price of horses, are more
numerous, if less luxuriously appointed.

If the upper and middle classes suffer from want of room in their houses,
and are wont to huddle much more than people in the same position would
at home, the working-man is not much better off, although his four or
five-roomed cottage at twelve shillings to fifteen shillings a week is
more easily within his means than the five shillings a week that he paid
in England. I do not of course mean that the working-man here knows
anything of model cottages, such as are seen on large estates in England.
I should even say that during the first year or two after his arrival
there is little improvement in his habitation; but before long he
acquires a small freehold, and with the aid of a building society becomes
his own landlord. Directly he has reached this stage, an improvement is
visibl