This remark holds true even with regard to many very stylish
abodes, built by the most stylish of gentlemen. And yet, when
that stylish gentleman, Louis le Grand of France, would build a
palace for his lady, friend, Madame de Maintenon, he built it but
one story high--in fact in the cottage style. But then, how
uncommonly quadrangular, spacious, and broad--horizontal acres,
not vertical ones. Such is the palace, which, in all its
one-storied magnificence of Languedoc marble, in the garden of
Versailles, still remains to this day. Any man can buy a square
foot of land and plant a liberty-pole on it; but it takes a king
to set apart whole acres for a grand triannon.

But nowadays it is different; and furthermore, what originated in
a necessity has been mounted into a vaunt. In towns there is
large rivalry in building tall houses. If one gentleman builds
his house four stories high, and another gentleman comes next
door and builds five stories high, then the former, not to be
looked down upon that way, immediately sends for his architect
and claps a fifth and a sixth story on top of his previous four.
And, not till the gentleman has achieved his aspiration, not till
he has stolen over the way by twilight and observed how his sixth
story soars beyond his neighbor's fifth--not till then does he
retire to his rest with satisfaction.

Such folks, it seems to me, need mountains for neighbors, to take
this emulous conceit of soaring out of them.

If, considering that mine is a very wide house, and by no means
lofty, aught in the above may appear like interested pleading, as
if I did but fold myself about in the cloak of a general