Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/78

 Our own destination, like that of the large group in whose company we now stood, was the third stage. We pass in rapid succession the first and second floors, where the respective passengers have been duly again slid off, while fresh passengers, waiting on each landing to go downwards, took their places; the descending and ascending machinery, meanwhile, never stopping in the endless process. A brief minute has brought us to the third stage, where we are shunted off with the usual prompt facility, giving our place to the other crowd in waiting to go further down, while those going upwards are taken in with the reversion movement on the other side.

These stages or floors are most commonly of five hundred feet interval. A sky of about that elevation is considered to give a fairly natural effect over one or two or a few square miles of subjacent dwellings. Some rather second-class subs, in the economizing of space, have brought down their sky even to two hundred and fifty feet, and rents are there, of course, much cheaper. But there is an uncomfortable and quite an artificial effect about such low quarters, which puts them quite out of fashion, although keen business men will stand anything in that way that reduces expenses in these competitive times. But, again, space is in short supply all round; and the dimensions of our apartments and homes in these days—cribbed, cabined, and confined, as we must all more or less be—are something of the narrowest. Fortunately, however, in this progressive emergency, the general sentiment is averse to a cold dreary surrounding of empty space. We should now feel utterly desolate and lost in the huge bedrooms and sitting-