The difficulty of obtaining efficient servants, and the worries consequent upon their inefficiency, is probably the chief cause of the rapid growth of the apartment-house among us. The contemporary architect has selected this class of building for some of his deadliest conceits. Great piles of fantastically disposed stone and iron tower up stories upon stories high, and frown upon us at the street-corners like so many Brobdingnagians. Most of them are very ugly; nevertheless they contain the homes of many citizens, and the continuous appearance of new and larger specimens attests their increasing popularity. Twenty years ago there was scarcely an apartment-house to be seen in our cities. There was a certain number of hotels where families could and did live all the year round, but the ten-story monster, with a janitor, an elevator, steam heat, electric light, and all the alleged comforts of home, was practically unknown. We have always professed to be such a home-loving people, and the so-called domestic hearth has always been such a touchstone of sentiment among us that the exchange of the family roof for the community of a flat by so many well-to-do persons certainly seems to suggest either that living cheek by jowl with a number of other households is not so distasteful as it seems to the uninitiated, or else that modern housekeeping is so irksome that women are tempted to swallow sentiment and escape from their trammels to the comparatively easy conditions of an apartment. It does seem as though one’s identity would be sacrificed or dimmed by becoming a tenant in common, and as though the family circle could never be quite the same thing to one who was conscious that his was only a part of one tremendous whole. And yet, more and more people seem to be anxious to share a janitor and front door, and, though the more fastidious insist on their own cuisine, there are not a few content to entrust even their gastronomic welfare to a kitchen in common.