has been worth struggling for. Not only are the figures that follow
accurate and honest, but I am inclined to believe that they represent
the very minimum of expenditure in the class of New York families to
which mine belongs. They may at first sight seem extravagant; but if the
reader takes the trouble to verify them--as I have done, alas! many
times to my own dismay and discouragement--he will find them
economically sound. This, then, is the catalogue of my success.

I possess securities worth about seven hundred and fifty thousand
dollars and I earn at my profession from thirty to forty thousand
dollars a year. This gives me an annual income of from sixty-five
thousand to seventy-five thousand dollars. In addition I own a house on
the sunny side of an uptown cross street near Central Park which cost
me, fifteen years ago, one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and is
now worth two hundred and fifty thousand. I could sell it for that. The
taxes alone amount to thirty-two hundred dollars--the repairs and annual
improvements to about twenty-five hundred. As the interest on the value
of the property would be twelve thousand five hundred dollars it will be
seen that merely to have a roof over my head costs me annually over
eighteen thousand dollars.

My electric-light bills are over one hundred dollars a month. My coal
and wood cost me even more, for I have two furnaces to heat the house,
an engine to pump the water, and a second range in the laundry. One man
is kept busy all the time attending to these matters and cleaning the
windows. I pay my butler eighty dollars a month; my second man
fifty-five; my valet sixty; my cook seventy; the two kitchen maids
twenty-five each; the head laundress forty-five; the two second
laundresses thirty-five each; the parlor maid thirty; the two housemaids
twenty-five each; my wife's maid thirty-five; my daughter's maid thirty;