The Pioneer Express

"A long and bitter experience in apartments forces me to observe," said Mr. Workenday, shivering as he hopped on the oilcloth of the bathroom with his bare feet, "that the architects who plan the ordinary flat of commerce do not bathe. I don't judge this from their appearance, because they are a particularly clean and nice lot of men. But I cannot believe that any one with the least respect for the importance of the bathroom could treat it with such architectural stepfatherliness.

"It always is shoved away in a dark corner as far from the bedrooms and as near the parlor or dining room as possible. It always is dark and ventilated by an airshaft up which there blows perpetually a dismal draft that has something on its mind and groans about it all the time. It ought to have something on its mind, for it is a sure killer. Then, of course, the bathroom, being the only place in the house where one takes off all his clothes and gets wet all over, is the place which most frequently has no heating appliances.

"Again, why do so many architects build the washstand in the hallway instead of in the bathroom, where it belongs? I don't know whether they think that a man enjoys taking his bath in sections or whether they act on the theory that he ought to take it gradually, preparing himself for the bathtub by degrees.

"I asked an architect once why he did it. 'Well,' said he, 'we hardly ever do differently except in private houses.'

"Has only the privateer, then, as the Europeans call him, the right to take a complete bath in one room, or has evolution produced a species of flatters who naturally are incapable of doing it?

"I suppose that the smallness of bathtubs is explained by the lack of room. Of course every flathouse bathtub is too small for any one except an infant, and I have noticed, not without some awe, that in each new flat into which we move the bathtub is smaller than it was in the one preceding. As I am growing stouter each year, a genuine misfortune for one whose finances make a third or fourth flat necessary. I am sure that if we make two or three more 'moves' we will, on this scale of bathtub decrease, find a bathtub into which I will not be able to get at all." --New York Press.