The matter of heat must next be considered. When a house is taken the rent is usually higher if there is a first-class heating arrangement included. Old-fashioned appliances mean lower rent, but they also require increased work on the part of the tenant or servant and are often unsatisfactory in the amount of warmth they supply. A good furnace or steam-heating plant may add to the actual sum of the rent, but it is generally cheaper in the long run. The quantity of coal burned by such a plant should be ascertained before concluding to take the house. All these questions are eliminated for the man who engages a steam-heated apartment, but he may change the place and keep the pain. The comfort of the entire winter depends upon a sufficient amount of heat, and radiators should be examined and a number of direct inquiries put so as to make sure that adequate warmth may be secured in bitter weather. The time when the heat is turned on and off should also be learned, since it is quite possible to shiver and suffer in September and May as well as at Christmas-time. Plumbing is always to be investigated closely, whether in a house or an apartment. No amount of gilding and marble fittings can compensate for cheap plumbing and a poor supply of hot water. The dweller in a house is dependent upon his own kitchen fire for hot water, as a general thing, but in nearly all apartment-houses the hot water is declared to be supplied from the cellar. Even in high-priced flats hot water is not always ready, and queries as to this are to be voiced before the lease is signed. More than that, care must be taken to make sure that the plumbing is in perfect repair and is not likely to give way at inconvenient seasons. All these details are essential and there are others little less important. The quantity of closet room, the pantries, the facilities for washing and drying clothes, the quiet of the house as assured or banished by the character of the neighbors and other tenants, the cleanliness of paint and paper, must all be looked after. No matter what inducements in the way of lowered rent are offered, it is always a mistake to go into a house which is not absolutely clean. This does not mean only that it should be swept and scoured before taking possession of it, but that paint and paper should be refreshed. The latter is not to be done by pasting fresh paper on over that which already covers the walls, as is the custom of many decorators--a custom connived at by landlords because of the saving of expense it implies. The incoming tenant must insist that the walls shall be scraped clean before the new paper is hung and that fresh paint shall be used wherever it is needed. It is hard enough to keep a house spotless in the best of circumstances, and when one enters a dwelling and establishes himself in the midst of the dirt of the departed tenants the task is the most discouraging that can be undertaken.