preparing the dishes and doing all that does not require the presence of fire in a large back-kitchen.  Happily every house has a bath-room, though it is often only a mere shed of wood or galvanized iron put up in the back-yard.  In many of the poorer households this shed does double duty as bath-house and wash-house, or the wash-house consists of a couple of boards, with a post to keep them up, and a piece of netting overhead to keep the sun off.  In larger houses, both bath-rooms and wash-houses are much the same as in England.  Nearly all families do their washing, and often their ironing also, at home.  Of the sanitary arrangements, it is almost impossible to speak too strongly; they are almost invariably objectionable and disgusting.

There are very few establishments large enough to indulge in the luxury of a servants’-hall, and sculleries and pantries are much smaller than in England.  Even the ordinary entrance-hall of an English house has to shrink into a mere enlargement of the passage.  All over the house, in fact, the accommodation is on a much more limited scale, unless it be with regard to stables, which, owing to the low price of horses, are more numerous, if less luxuriously appointed.

If the upper and middle classes suffer from want of room in their houses, and are wont to huddle much more than people in the same position would at home, the working-man is not much better off, although his four or five-roomed cottage at twelve shillings to fifteen shillings a week is more easily within his means than the five shillings a week that he paid in England.  I do not of course mean that the working-man here knows anything of model cottages, such as are seen on large estates in England.  I should even say that during the first year or two after his arrival there is little improvement in his habitation; but before long he acquires a small freehold, and with the aid of a building society becomes his own landlord.  Directly he has reached this stage, an improvement is visible in his condition.  It is difficult to over-estimate the social value of the work that has been done by building societies.  In the suburbs of the large towns you see whole townships built entirely by these societies; every inhabitant of these townships in the course of a few years becomes a proprietor, and the society further aids him by making loans to him on mortgage of his property.  It is the defect of these townships that the houses are all as like one another as peas in a pod—­four-roomed squares or six-roomed oblongs built of red brick, and with every detail exactly the same; but their plainness and similarity does not detract from their manifest virtues.