"Put in an elevator," he suggested.

"Well, that is what Eveleth Strange has, and she lets the servants use
it, too," and Mrs. Makely said, with a look at me: "I suppose that would
please you, Mr. Homos. Well, there's a nice side-room over the front door
here, and a bath-room at the rear. Then you have more stairs, and large
chambers, and two side-rooms. That makes plenty of chambers for a small
family. I used to give two of the third-story rooms to my two girls. I
ought really to have made them sleep in one; it seemed such a shame to
let the cook have a whole large room to herself; but I had nothing else
to do with it, and she did take such comfort in it, poor old thing! You
see, the rooms came wrong in our house, for it fronted north, and I had
to give the girls sunny rooms or else give them front rooms, so that it
was as broad as it was long. I declare, I was perplexed about it the
whole time we lived there, it seemed so perfectly anomalous."

"And what is an English-basement house like?" I ventured to ask, in
interruption of the retrospective melancholy she had fallen into.

"Oh, _never_ live in an English-basement house, if you value your
spine!" cried the lady. "An English-basement house is nothing _but_
stairs. In the first place, it's only one room wide, and it's a story
higher than the high-stoop house. It's one room forward and one back, the
whole way up; and in an English-basement it's always _up_, and
_never_ down. If I had my way, there wouldn't one stone be left upon
another in the English-basements in New York."

I have suffered Mrs. Makely to be nearly as explicit to you as she was to
me; for the kind of house she described is of the form ordinarily
prevailing in all American cities, and you can form some idea from it how