Let us visit a young couple in Christianopolis. We reach the house
by way of a street, twenty feet broad, faced by houses with a wide
frontage on the street, some forty feet in length, and of from fifteen
to twenty-five feet in depth. In our crowded towns, today, where people
pay for land by the front foot, the frontage is narrow and the houses
are deep; and as a result there is a dreadful insufficiency of light
and air; but in Christianopolis, as in some of the older European
towns, the houses are built to get a maximum of air and sunlight. If
it is raining when we make our visit, a covered walk, five feet wide,
supported by columns twelve feet high, will shelter us from the rain.
Our friends live, we shall say, in one of the average apartments;
so they have three rooms, a bathroom, a sleeping apartment, and a
kitchen. “The middle part within the tower has a little open space with
a wide window, where wood and the heavier things are raised aloft by
pulleys”--in short, a dumbwaiter. Looking out from the window in the
rear, we face a well-kept garden; and if our host is inclined to give
us wine, he may let us take our pick from among the cobwebs of a small
private cellar in the basement, where such things are kept. If it is a
cold day, the furnace is going; or if we happen to make our visit in
the summer time, the awnings are drawn.
Our host makes apologies, perhaps, for a litter of wood and shavings
that occupies a corner of the kitchen, for he has just been putting up
a few shelves in his spare time, and has borrowed a kit of tools from
the public supply house. (Since he is not a carpenter, he has no need
for these tools the rest of the year; and other people can have their
turn at them.) Coming from Utopia, one of the things that strikes us is
the absence of domestic attendance; and when we ask our hostess about
it, she tells us that she will not have anyone to wait upon her until
she is confined.
“But isn’t there a lot of work for you to do all by yourself?” we shall
ask.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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