For all
the wear and tear they got they should have lasted a thousand years.
Upstairs were the bedrooms; "mother-and-father's room" the largest; a
smaller room for one or two sons another for one or two daughters;
each of these rooms containing a double bed, a "washstand," a
"bureau," a wardrobe, a little table, a rocking-chair, and often a
chair or two that had been slightly damaged downstairs, but not enough
to justify either the expense of repair or decisive abandonment in the
attic. And there was always a "spare-room," for visitors (where the
sewing-machine usually was kept), and during the 'seventies there
developed an appreciation of the necessity for a bathroom. Therefore
the architects placed bathrooms in the new houses, and the older
houses tore out a cupboard or two, set up a boiler beside the kitchen
stove, and sought a new godliness, each with its own bathroom. The
great American plumber joke, that many-branched evergreen, was planted
at this time.
At the rear of the house, upstairs was a bleak little chamber, called
"the girl's room," and in the stable there was another bedroom,
adjoining the hayloft, and called "the hired man's room.
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