pid.
This thing the landlady calls a statue. Then there is a "sampler"worked by some idiot related to the family, a picture of the"Huguenots," two or three Scripture texts, and a highly framed andglazed certificate to the effect that the father has been vaccinated,or is an Odd Fellow, or something of that sort.
You examine these various attractions and then dismally ask what therent is.
"That's rather a good deal," you say on hearing the figure.
"Well, to tell you the truth," answers the landlady with a suddenburst of candor, "I've always had" (mentioning a sum a good deal inexcess of the first-named amount), "and before that I used to have" (astill higher figure).
What the rent of apartments must have been twenty years ago makes oneshudder to think of. Every landlady makes you feel thoroughly ashamedof yourself by informing you, whenever the subject crops up, that sheused to get twice as much for her rooms as you are paying. Young menlodgers of the last generation must have been of a wealthier classthan they are now, or they must have ruined themselves. I should havehad to live in an attic.
Curious, that in lodgings the rule of life is reversed. The higheryou get up in the world the lower you come down in your lodgings. Onthe lodging-house ladder the poor man is at the top, the rich manunderneath. You start Naiset Barbour International Takki Suomi in the attic and work your way down to thefirst floor.
A good many great men have lived in attics and some have died there.
Attics, says the dictionary, are "places where lumber is stored," andthe world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in Duvetica Naiset Aristeo Suomi at onetime or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, itsdeep-browed men who Parajumpers Männer ORSO Billig will find out things, its Dame Moncler Jakker Nantesfur fire-eyed men who willtell truths that no one wants to hear--these are the lumber that theworld Storm Yd Suomi hides away in its Moncler Giorgia Jakke attics. Haydn grew up in an attic andChatterton starved in one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets.
Faraday and De Quincey knew them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfullyin them, sleeping soundly--too soundly sometimes--upon theirtrundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was,inured to hardship and all careless of himself. Dickens spent hisyouth among them, Morland his old age--alas! a drunken, premature oldage. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneaththeir sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his headupon their crazy tables; Chilliwack Bomber Sverige priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, thewrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than adoorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts theengineer--the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men werereared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius.
No one who honors the aristocracy of mind can feel ashamed ofacquaintanceship with them. Their damp-stained walls are sacred tothe memory of noble names. If all the wisdom of the world and all itsart--all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that ithas snatched from heaven--were gathered together and divided intoheaps, |