THE AMERICAN WORKER'S HOUSE.
[To TIER EDITOR Or TUB " SPECTATOR...1 SIR,—Since you are thinking of combustible houses, do allow me to mention the American labourer's house, which he builds, not as kind people think he ought to build, but as he wants his house. He builds three rooms, about six- teen feet square—parlour, bedroom, and kitchen. His walls are of wood, plastered on the inside ; his ceilings are high ; nothing is saved by throwing away the ends of " uprights " ; his windows are large—windows are cheaper than walls. He has no entry, no scullery, no fireplace, and no cupboard; he wants no notches cut from his rooms, he wants them "in the clear." His kitchen chimney begins near the ceiling; it is made of a few bricks, and is supported by four "up- rights," which are enclosed and form a little china closet or pot-hole. His cooking is done on a little iron cook-stove having a stove-pipe running up to a stove-pipe hole in the chimney. His bedroom is heated by a small iron stove whose pipe runs up to a stove-pipe hole on the other side of the chimney. This chimney is built in the parti- tion between the bedroom and kitchen. His parlour is heated by a stove with a pipe running up to a little parlour chimney. In a small cellar under his house cabbages and potatoes are kept, and, on a banging shelf, butter and eggs, and the wash-tub, and sometimes fuel are there. Often he keeps fuel in a small shed. He always has "a bit of land" if he likes, and the kind people who think "a bit of land" a benefit to a workman would be surprised to see how often that land is covered with raga and bottles. The fewness of doors, partitions, and bricks makes this house cheap. The thrifty young workman soon has a better house and slips into the grooves of success ; the unthrifty only changes to beds in his parlour, beds in his kitchen, and more beds in his bedroom, and the thrifty are not a pin-point in the great mass of the unthrifty. "Vast are the resources of parsimony," and if kind people could convince the unthrifty of this fact nobody would have to think about housing
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