Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/150

 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 and glazed certificate to the effect that the father has been vaccinated, or is an Oddfellow, or something of that sort.

You examine these various attractions, and then dismally ask what the rent is.

"That's rather a good deal," you say, on hearing the figure.

"Well, to tell you the truth," answers the landlady with a sudden burst of candour, "I've always had"—(mentioning a sum a good deal in excess of the first-named amount), "and before that I used to have"—(a still higher figure).

What the rent of apartments must have been twenty years ago makes one shudder to think of. Every landlady makes you feel thoroughly ashamed of yourself by informing you, whenever the subject crops up, that she used to get twice as much for her rooms as you are paying. Young men lodgers of the last generation must have been of a wealthier class than they are now, or they must have ruined themselves. I should have had to live in an attic.

Curious, that in lodgings, the rule of life is reversed. The higher you get up in the world, the lower you come down in your lodgings. On the lodging-house ladder, the poor man is at the top, the rich man under-