Basement

“ The basement is perhaps the most vulnerable point in the armor of exclusive sanctity that encases the church. Here, if anywhere, organized church work for boys may be tolerated. Whenever it is, lights begin to shine from the basement windows several evenings a week, a noisy enthusiasm echoes through the ghostly spaces above, in a literal and figurative sense cobwebs are brushed away. ”

“ The stone from the basement cries aloud And the beam from the timber calls. There are steeple-houses on every hand, And pulpits that bless and ban, And the Lord will not grudge the single church That is set apart for man. ”

“ The basement was an intricate world of kitchen, pantry, engine-room, furnace, wine cellars and what not. Outside was a tawny waste of sand held together in places in the form of hummocks and even concealing hills by sand-binding grasses.
That night, because it was windy and dull and bleak, we stayed inside, I for one going outside only long enough to discover that there were great wide verandahs of concrete about the house, fit for great entertainments in themselves, and near at hand, hummocks of sand. Inside all was warm and flaring enough. ”

“ This basement was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the wine-cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that makes its appeal. ”

“ Through the basement window one could see a high brick wall, gleaming in the strong sunlight, and if one laid one’s self over the table, with one’s head in the neighbor’s lap, ’way high up one could see a tiny piece of blue sky as large as a handkerchief perhaps, with feathery clouds driving over it. ”

“ Grope your way into a basement—wherever one of our fantastic signs hangs out—or climb broken stairs into a dusty garret—over a contractor's storage of old lumber and bath-tubs—over the litter of the roofs—and you will find artistic folk with flowing ties, spreading their elbows at bare tables with unkept, dripping candles.
Here is youth that is blown hither from distant villages—youth that was misunderstood at home—youth that looks from its poor valley to the heights and follows a flame across the darkness—youth whose eyes are a window on the stars. ”

“ About a month ago the basement of the empty house next door was taken by a typical Eurasian family—such a crew! beginning with an old father who goes about in a vest, slack, dirty trousers, and blue socks; an old mother, vastly fat, in petticoat, chemise, and slippers; some sons and daughters of all ages, and their husbands and wives and children, and two native servants. The basement they occupy consists of three large rooms. ”

“ In any London suburb we still may see modest villas thus entered by a flight of steps raised above a high basement, which are, doubtless, quite unconscious of their direct descent from the keep of the twelfth century, entered only by a ladder reared against the front, or by knotted ropes let down from the first-floor window! ”

“ Miss Luscombe was looking out of the window, looking up to the street, waiting. At last she saw from her basement (the "tank," as her friends called it) a glimpse on the pavement of a pair of feet that she knew. They were the feet of Mr. John Ryland Rathbone. She hastened to prepare herself for his visit.
It is obvious that people who live in a basement must look at life from a different point of view from all others. The proudest of women in that position must necessarily see it de bas en haut. ”

“ I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed—the plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor was of hard cement. ”

“ The flower-boats of the first size, consist of two storeys: namely, a basement, or, if the reader prefers it, a first landing, and an upper storey. But the second landing does not occupy the entire storey. You would call it rather a pavilion, raised above the centre of the establishment. The roof forms a terrace, which is usually furnished with tables and chairs. The basement is divided into a multitude of small apartments, decorated with rather free pictures, after the Chinese fashion, and each containing perhaps a table, a few chairs, and sometimes a bed. ”

“ The basement is now as light and airy as any basement can be. There is no scullery, but that apartment is unnecessary in most houses and certainly unnecessary in a small house where two, or at most three, servants are employed, and which contains a pleasant room in which they can sit and have their meals. ”

“ The existing keep is composed of a basement and three floors. At present the basement chamber is entered by a door in the north wall from the inner ward, the first and other floors by a well-stair in the east angle, entered from the main gate. The basement is three steps below the ground level. It is 31 feet north and south and 14 feet 5 inches wide. It has a high-pointed vault, a loop in the south or outer end, and in the north end a loop, and above it a window, and by their side the door from the inner ward. ”

“ The high doors stand open from them to the paved chamber of a basement tremendously tall and not vulgarly lighted, from which, in turn, mounts the slow stone staircase that draws you further on. The great point is, that if you are worthy of this impression at all, there isn't a single item of it of which the association isn't noble. ”

“ Below the garret there were two unimportant stories with chambers, dining-room, parlor, and so on; then you came to the brick-paved kitchen in the basement, and a perfectly glorious cellar, with rats in it. Outside there was a large yard, with five or six huge old cherry-trees, and a garden plot, where every spring my boy tried to make a garden, with never-failing failure. ”

“ It had a basement, and out of the warren of small rooms of which it had once consisted, a fairly large hall and a few fair-sized rooms had been made.
The newer but not very new portion of the house had no basement, and it was by a short flight of steps that you descended from the hall into the drawing-room, and by another short flight that you ascended to the bedroom floor. Here the same irregularity was apparent. A corridor ran through the house from end to end on this floor, broken where the new part joined the old by half a dozen steep steps. ”

“ On account of the inundations to which the place is subject, none of the houses have what can be called a ground-floor; and the basement is generally disfigured by ponderous gates, like those of barrier towns, which open to the warehouses that are attached to the back part of each house. ”

“ So in the basement each family shall have a space at the rear of the house, twenty-three feet in width, each having its own exit into its own yard from the laundry and store-rooms which will be situated there. In the front part of the basement, where in the average 156Boston house the coal and furnace are usually found, will be the heating appliances for the whole building, and heat will be provided in the different stories as it is in the ordinary hotel. ”

“ The basement floor is usually at the ground level, or at most two feet or three feet below it. Where the keep is built on rising ground it may happen that a chamber, the door of which is at the ground level, may have one wall half buried beneath the soil, but there is nothing beyond this. Prisoners of the common sort were not shut up in the keep, space there was too valuable. The basement could scarce have been used as a prison where it contained the castle well, and the mural chambers usually are barred inside. ”

“ Well, the building is big and the grounds are gorgeous, full of beautiful trees and shrubbery. I’m no architect, so I can’t tell you about the building except that it spreads out and up three stories, besides the basement floor, and Mother says we need wings! The basement floor isn’t under the ground or anything, and all the freshmen have their lockers there. We put our wraps and books there when we do not need them and get them out when we do. We have a ‘home room’ and a teacher in charge of it, and we go there the first thing in the morning and the last thing before we go home. ”

“ The basement kitchen is the worst of all, because it marks a class of house that has seen better days, and is rapidly deteriorating. Therefore if one has to choose between two houses, one of which has no basement, and another which has, one should at once select the basementless one.{65} There are sure to be cellars below the house, which will keep it dry. One doesn’t even in the suburbs often come across a house, the boards of which are pushed out of place by enterprising mushrooms growing in the soil beneath, and ambitious of appearing in fresh air and among the haunts of men. ”

“ The young man, skirting the side of the building, went down the slope toward the basement door. To keep out of range of the revealing rays from within he made a circuit through the untrodden snow and gradually approached the farther angle of the basement wall. ”

“ When the town-house is built on the basement plan, and the drawing-room or parlor is up-stairs, the family, to escape 22 from its discomforts, habitually take refuge in the small room opening off the hall on the ground floor; so that instead of sitting in a room twenty or twenty-five feet wide, they are packed into one less than half that size and exposed to the frequent intrusions from which, in basement houses, the drawing-room is free. ”

“ I have before observed that, from the wish of display, the American houses are generally speaking, too large for the proprietors and for the domestics which are employed. Vying with each other in appearance, their receiving rooms are splendidly furnished, but they do not live in them.
The basement in the front area, which with us is usually appropriated to the housekeeper’s-room and offices, is in most of their houses fitted up as a dining-room; by no means a bad plan, as it is cool in summer, warm in winter, and saves much trouble to the servants. ”

“ It is not merely a house divided against itself, but one divided across itself. It is a house in which the first floor is fighting the second floor, in which the basement is oppressed from above and attics are besieged from below. There is a great deal of gunpowder in the cellars; and people are by no means comfortable even on the roof. ”

“ Meanwhile, the old packing rooms had been huddled into unused cellars, and the space that they had occupied in the basement, indeed the entire basement, was being excavated to an astounding depth. Soon an immense subterranean area would be scooped out; vast halls with wide staircases would be constructed; a shop below a shop would be ready for Mr. Marsden's use. ”

“ At present the basement consists of a front room and kitchen, coal cellars under the pavement, a lavatory, and a little piece at the end of the passage leading to the back area, which can be arranged for a knife- and boot-cleaning place. But there is no larder. This must be built. A door is cut to lead out of the kitchen into a tiny lobby, out of this lobby one door opens into the white-tiled, well-ventilated larder, and the other into the area. ”

“ He assured the dog that if business ever did come to the mill, he would be ready for it.
It was on Christmas Day of that winter that he first heard the noise. Going down to the basement to see that nothing had been injured by the bitter freeze of the night before, his attention was attracted, even while descending the stone steps, by a peculiar grinding noise, that seemed to come from out of the ground. His ancestors, building for permanency, had not only put in solid foundations, but had paved the entire basement with slate flagstones three feet wide and as many inches thick. ”

“ Going down into the basement they take a log about one foot through and cut the right length, cut notches in it for footsteps and set it in place and the little Indian children can go up and down this like squirrels with less accidents than the whites have on their stairs. The whole family eats in the basement and all the cooking is done there and at night things are cleared away and all the women and girls sleep in this basement, while the men and boys all go to the sweat-houses to sleep. ”

“ Upon entering the basement and making an investigation, I found that I was in a trap, as the street in front of the buildings was much higher in elevation than the alley from whence I had just come, and as a consequence, there was no means of egress in that direction. Returning towards the entrance, I discerned, by the aid of a subdued gaslight, that a stairway led from the basement to the flats above, but not having any idea then as to where it might lead, I thought to avoid it and take chances in the alleyway, hoping to smuggle myself in the crowd by some process and escape detection. ”

“ The basement contains tanks and a vault with a corbelled roof, which was certainly a prison, and bears a strong likeness to a similar vault in the inner gatehouse at Alnwick. There is no basement stair, communication with the vaults being through trap-doors in the floor above. On this floor are a number of dark vaulted store-rooms, one of which was the wine-cellar, and has its own stair to the daïs end of the hall on the floor above. ”

“ At this I turned my attention to the gaslight, which I reached without attraction, and after turning it down until it was almost extinguished, giving barely sufficient glimmer to permit my return, I started for the stairway to which reference was made when I first entered the basement, and had hardly reached it when the basement door was pushed cautiously aside and two men entered, passing within three feet of where I was concealed behind a post. ”