ee-story
brownstone house in East Thirty-eighth Street. Some prosperous merchant
had probably lived there twenty years before, but it had been converted
into a nest for workers.

[Illustration: "YOU ADVERTISE ROOMS FOR LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING."]

"Yes, sir," she replied. "Two back rooms."

"What floor?" I asked, having in mind the force of gravity.

"Second floor. How many in your family?"

"Only me."

"You keep house alone?"

"Certainly. I know how."

"Don't you find it lonesome?"

"I hope so. I want to be lonesome."

"Well, I don't know." She hesitated and looked me over with great care.
"Have you anybody to recommend you?"

"I see that you doubt my sanity, madam. My nerves are a little out of
line; I have just left the hospital and must be quiet. Do you see? If
you must have references, I work for the Department of Health."

"Oh, that's all right, then, if you work for the Department of Health."

The rooms suited me. The small hall-room was the kitchen, and the larger
room was the living-room, equipped with one of those furniture
alligators and diabolical economizers of space, a folding bed, and a few
chairs bravely presenting a polished but brittle front, under the
bracing influence of the gluepot, as I afterward learned. Every time one
of those chairs broke down under me, my heart also went out to the poor
soul, Mrs. Dewey, the landlady, who made her living by pinching a profit
out of every penny. She was a generous creature, so far as she could be;
but a hard world's exactions squeezed her to a meanness she herself
detested, but must practice or starve. When I think long of poor Mrs.
Dewey, whom I knew for only a few weeks, I want to begin life over again
as a reformer. I'd take an axe to Mr. Dewey, and begin my reforms on him
as a typical subject in need of annihilation, and get as far as a man a
few centuries ahead of his time might expect to.

Old Dewey--the Mr. Dewey herein before referred to--was the black
background and cellar of the institution. Like a rat, he came from the
coal heap or a hidden corner unawares and was gone into further darkness
before you could turn to learn the cause of the noise he made. His
shadowy participation in home management contributed to the family's
progress as a millstone about the neck of its mistress, and did not
follow over-stimulation, the common cause of chronic depression in
husbands of boarding-house keepers and women who rent furnished rooms.
Bone-laziness