When a very rich man has a few lots in an out of the way place, he builds a row of houses for poor people and gets a good rent for them—enjoining it on his agent not to let a poor widow have any one of them; because, if she should be unable to pay her rent, he would be ashamed to sell her little furniture. His houses are miserably built, generally one brick thick, and with only one coat of plaster on the walls; no crane in the kitchen, no cistern, no well, no comfort of any kind. The poor tenants might think themselves well off with having the shell to cover them. Mrs. Bangs knew that the life to come was a long one—to last for ever; so she thought it was not worth while to hoard up money for the very short time she had to live here. She had a great love of comfort herself, and so had all her children; and they could not bear to set a poor widow in an empty house, without even a closet to put her clothes in. So she had closets made between the two bed rooms, and likewise between the parlour and kitchen. And she gave them a chance of helping themselves still further by having a good deep, dry cellar, where they could keep their half barrel of fish, and their little joints of meat, and small pots of butter from the heats of summer, and their vegetables from the frosts of winter, and why coal and wood should be kept out of doors in winter was more than she could tell. It was easy to build a cellar, she thought, and so the cellars were made. “It seems to me,” she continued to say, “that men have no idea of comfort themselves, or they would not grudge it to their poor tenants; women understand these matters better, and as God has endowed them with greater sensibilities than the other sex, why it is incumbent on them to show their grateful sense of this partiality in their favour; and how can we show it but by attending to those little things which make up, by their great number, all the happiness of life? Men never view the subject in this light, but let that alone, ‘tis no concern of ours.” The thirty houses, with the plainest furniture that could be bought, cost exactly thirty thousand dollars—the precise sum she intended to appropriate to them. Fuel and repairs and taxes cost her twelve hundred a year; this with the interest on the thirty thousand, came to three thousand dollars a year. With an income of more than thirty thousand, and the prospect of a great rise in the value of her lots of ground, what was the annual loss of three thousand dollars?