fewer and fewer, the common parlor was rented, the one-family kitchen was
made to do duty for twenty persons. The house became pervaded with burned
fat and tobacco-smoke--a most villainous combination, gossip flourished,
and the limit of discomfort was reached. What wonder that a good Samaritan
built the first flat where the wearied nerves could find peace in the
thicker walls, and could escape the eternal "fry" by going out to meals!
It is a perfectly natural evolution from the impossible conditions which
the eighties and nineties developed.

The early attempts, built on the old lines after the old ideas, before the
new life was accepted, are not satisfactory and, being built of brick or
stone, they are even more difficult to get rid of than the preceding. So
each type goes down in the scale of decent living. A given roof is made to
cover more people crowding closer and closer, causing home in the sense of
privacy and comfort to recede farther and farther away, until the lover of
his kind stands aghast at the magnitude of the problem before society when
it awakens to the task confronting it. Fortunately these rows of houses
are disappearing under the demand of business. The invasion of the
residential district is a real blessing, in that it pulls down these
houses which in twenty years have outlived their usefulness and can serve
a good purpose no longer.

Let us hope that either the demands of business or the common sense of
society will also sweep away the fifth class: (5) City flats put up by the
conscienceless money-maker with only that idea of giving the public what
the public wants (because it knows no better) which gives the newspaper
its pernicious influences. At first it was supposed the flat-dwellers
would keep house, and arrangements of a sort were made. This compressed
the work of the house into such small quarters that the maid was given a
room down in the basement along with the furnace, or in the top story