almost be laid down as an axiom, that the American woman, no matter
in what walk of life you observe her, or what the time or the
place, is always persistently and grotesquely overdressed. From
the women who frequent the hotels of our summer or winter resorts,
down all the steps of the social staircase to the char-woman, who
consents (spasmodically) to remove the dust and waste-papers from
my office, there seems to be the same complete disregard of
fitness. The other evening, in leaving my rooms, I brushed against
a portly person in the half-light of the corridor. There was a
shimmer of (what appeared to my inexperienced eyes as) costly
stuffs, a huge hat crowned the shadow itself, "topped by nodding
plumes," which seemed to account for the depleted condition of my
feather duster.

I found on inquiring of the janitor, that the dressy person I had
met, was the char-woman in street attire, and that a closet was set
aside in the building, for the special purpose of her morning and
evening transformations, which she underwent in the belief that her
social position in Avenue A would suffer, should she appear in the
streets wearing anything less costly than seal-skin and velvet or
such imitations of those expensive materials as her stipend would
permit.

I have as tenants of a small wooden house in Jersey City, a bank
clerk, his wife and their three daughters. He earns in the
neighborhood of fifteen hundred dollars a year. Their rent (with
which, by the way, they are always in arrears) is three hundred
dollars. I am favored spring and autumn by a visit from the ladies
of that family, in the hope (generally futile) of inducing me to do
some ornamental papering or painting in their residence, subjects