trust that this new one, this 1860, will treat us both more kindly by bringing us oftener together than the last. It is ten years now, or will be in the spring, since we first knew each other. Paris, Shady Hill, Newport, New York, are the various places which your affection has made happier for me. Do you recall the pleasant spring evening when we first met in the Café de Paris? How young we were then! I am not certain that we have grown very old since then, — but what years of experience these ten have been for us both! The next ten will be shorter, so love me more during their course to make up for their quicker passage. What you say about the Harpers is at once satisfactory and vexatious. As long as you feel bound to devote yourself to money-making, and they pay you so well, so long I suppose you must keep to them, but I shall be truly glad when the time comes that you can cut loose from them, and work more after your own pleasure, and more in other fields than those which they own and occupy. . . . In a letter to Mrs. Gaskell there is a full account of the Boston Model Lodging-Houses,' on behalf of which Norton had rendered effective service soon after his return from India. Both for its biographical bearing and as a record of an early social experiment, the passage is of interest here. 1 See "Model Lodging-Houses in Boston," by C. E. Norton, Atlantic Monthly, June, 1860. To Mrs. Gaskell SHADY HILL, 7 February, 1860. ... I must come to our Model Lodging-Houses. In the first place I am sorry to say that not so much has been done to provide good and economical houses for our poor as ought to have been done. The immense flood of emigration from Ireland and Germany, from about 1840 to 1855, crowded our Atlantic cities with poor, and no proper means could be taken to provide them with suitable homes. For a long time we let things take their own course, but at last they grew so intolerable that a partial effort was made to improve them. There had been more or less talk and feeling about the need of action, when in the winter of 1852 I wrote an article on "Dwellings and Schools for the Poor," for the "North American Review." I gave in it an account of some of your English Model Houses, and had woodcuts made for it of the elevation and plan of the house lately put up in Sweatham Street in London. The article excited some attention. In the course of the following summer I got a plan drawn for a house in Boston, and in December I drew up a circular which was signed by four of our leading men, setting forth a proposal for building a Model Lodging-House on a large scale, and estimating the cost of land and building at $40,000. A subscription was opened, and the sum needed was secured in the course of the winter of 1853. A lot of land in a central place was obtained, and in the course of that year and the next two houses of brick, each with tenements for twenty families, were built.... The houses were first occupied in 1854. They were at once filled. In 1855 I went abroad, and from that time till this winter I have known but little about them, except that they were going on well. This winter I was again chosen on the board of Directors, and it was but last week that I attended a meeting of the Directors and heard a report of their doings and the condition of the houses. From the time of the first occupation of the houses to this not a single tenement has been vacant for over a week. Above $30,000 of rent have become due and been paid; not a single dollar has been lost. The rents were fixed at a rate which, while allowing a certain sum for repairs and for depreciation in the property, should give a clear annual return of six per cent on the investment. It has been found that even this rate was moderate and easily paid in proportion to the rents asked and paid for very far inferior accommodations. The money expended in building has thus been proved to be a good investment in a merely mercenary point of view. The rents received for the first three years were reserved until they had accumulated to an amount sufficient to build another house upon an unoccupied part of the land which we owned, with accommodations of a somewhat superior order for mechanics. This house is now occupied by nine families, the lower story being used for a store. The hope with which the houses were put up, that they might stimulate private individuals to improve the habitations of the poor, and to erect new ones of a similar kind, has been so far fulfilled, that the association by which these Model Houses were erected considers that its work is virtually done. Great improvements have been made in the old lodging houses through |