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IV
THE LITTLE HOUSE OF MANY MIRRORS
O       NE walks the streets of New York and receives
the fantastic impression that some giant archi-
tect has made for the city thousands of houses
in replica. These dismal brownstone buildings are
so like without, and alas! so like within, that one won-
ders how their owners know their homes from one
another. I have had the pleasure of making over
many of these gloomy barracks into homes for other
people, and when we left the old Irving Place house
we took one of these dreary houses for ourselves, and
made it over into a semblance of what a city house
should be.
You know the kind of house-there are tens of thou-
sands of them-a four story and basement house of
pinkish brownstone, with a long flight of ugly stairs
from the street to the first floor. The common belief
that all city houses of this type must be dark and dreary
just because they always have been dark and dreary is
an unnecessary superstition.
My object in taking this house was twofold: I
wanted to prove to my friends that it was possible to
take one of the darkest and grimiest of city houses and
make it an abode of sunshine and light, and I wanted
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