I have some little plans for the arrangements of rooms which I hope will work well. The beds of the tenement houses have always been a great trouble to me. Of all clumsy and unsanitary arrangements for sleeping when one is obliged to sleep with four or five others in a small room, ordinary bedsteads seem to me the worst. Now in order to introduce all the improvements that I want, I am obliged to economize space. The people must be crowded together, there is no other way out of that; so, for the children, I mean to put up single beds, berth-fashion, over each other. Strong iron sockets fastened to the wall will hold an iron frame on which a little mattress with bedclothes will be strapped. In the daytime these will be turned up, one under the other, and hooked against the wall, out of the way, and a neat little curtain fastened to the upper one will hang down and conceal both as if they were a set of hanging shelves. At night the youngster in the upper berth will be protected from all danger of falling out by two or three leather straps fastened on to the upper part of the berth and hooked firmly to the lower edge of the framework. I have thought all the details out one by one as various objections were made to my scheme. I think this plan a fine solution for the dirt and vermin question. Besides, the mattresses, being so small, could be very much more easily aired and turned than if they were larger. But an agent, to whom I explained it, protested, saying she wouldn’t encourage such an idea at all. “People ought to live properly, in regular fashion, and not get used to putting up with any such makeshifts as that. It wouldn’t be living naturally.” “You old bigot!” said I inwardly, “your grandmother, I suppose, would have protested against sleeping-cars and elevators and dumb-waiters as being unnatural and artificial!” I am amazed every day to see how densely stupid some sensible people are. I know a Frenchwoman who has always slept at home on a bed four feet high, canopied and enshrouded with curtains. It is half a day’s work to make it, and she feels out in the cold and all forlorn when put into one of our little, open, low, brass bedsteads. I suppose she would think it quite as unhomelike and as demoralizing in its tendency as my agent thought my berth beds would be. The other day I explained the idea to a poor woman in a tenement house, who with the greatest difficulty was trying to sweep under two good-sized bedsteads in a tiny room. At first she did not seem to comprehend, but when she did, she smiled and nodded and said, “I like that, Mees; easy to sweep; children no kick each other all time; my children sleep four in one bed—too much kick and cry.”