Loft

“ Carpets, blankets, shawls, pictures, mirrors, rocking-chairs, and blue overalls hang from the ceiling, and devious pathways wind amidst piles of ready-made clothing, show-cases filled with every sort of knick-knack and half hidden under heaps of hats and boots and shoes, bookcases, secretaries, chests of drawers, mattresses, lounges, and bedsteads, to the stairway of a loft similarly appointed, and to a back room overflowing with glassware and crockery. ”

“ From the top loft, still bare and echoing, where the highly respectable summer tenants were to put up the cots of their children, to the outside den which served for a kitchen, whence a wooden ladder led to a recess among the rafters, occupied by Madame Pyat as a bedroom; from the masses of Virginia creeper on the thatched roof to the thicket of acacias and roses on the front grass-plat, and the high flowery wall which shut them off from the curious eyes of the street, it was all, in the lovers' feeling, the predestined setting for such an idyll as theirs. ”

“ Picture a bare, plank-ceiled loft, some forty feet long by twenty feet broad, divided in the exact center [70] by a partition of half-inch matched boards and lighted by five windows. Imagine the walls and ceiling painted a pea-green, mentally hang two big oil-lamps—one in the middle of each room—from the latter, and spread half a dozen skins—bear, coyote, antelope, and cougar—over the discolored floor, and you have Pete’s apartments. ”

“ In the turf-house loft, as well as in the burial-mound, and down in the willow bole—where she has also paid a visit—all is cold and lonely and full of damp and discomfort.
She longs for the spacious, broken-down farm loft, where the moss-covered thatch clings to the broad, low chimney-stacks; where the clay-lined walls are warping and the small-paned windows hang askew.
There is her real home, the home of her race....
The new farm-buildings, where bricks replace clay and wood, don’t attract her; they are much too cold, and too clean! ”

“ The dark loft, the lonely shanty miles away from any other habitation, the mysterious allusions to the possession of property, all naturally combined to raise the most dreadful suspicions in the mind of the solitary traveller. ”

“ No sooner were we in this vast place than we saw a strange and startling thing—a man, sitting or crouching on the floor, his hands before him, the wrists tied together, his body bound with thongs of raw hide to a big post which stood in the centre of the floor and supported the beam of the loft above. ”

“ Always the same rows of red-brick or brownstone houses, all alike, the monotony broken only by infrequent warehouses or loft-buildings; always the same doubtful mounting of stone steps, the same searching for a bell, the same waiting, the same slatternly, suspicious landlady, the same evil hallway with a brown hat-rack, a steel-engraving with one corner stained with yellow, a carpet worn through to the flooring in a large oval hole just in front of the stairs, a smell of cabbage, a lack of ventilation. ”

“ It now remained in the loft for twenty mortal years, and it might have remained longer, had not the house been going to be rebuilt. The roof was taken off, the bottle discovered and talked about; but it did not understand what was said. One does not learn languages, living up alone in a loft, even in twenty years. ”

“ The shop was a separate building, of rough planks, a story and a half high, the loft of which was one great dormitory well provided with beds on the floor, but with no other article of bedroom furniture. They who slept in this loft had no fastidious standards of personal luxury. These two buildings, with some half-dozen out-houses of one sort and another, stood in an enclosure surrounded by a low white picket fence, which gave to the place a certain home-like look, spite of the neglected condition of the ground, which was bare sand, or sparsely tufted with weeds and wild grass. ”

“ This screen, which is beautifully preserved, with flamboyant tracery, is remarkable for the spiral staircase by which it is ascended, supported by slender shafts, and most ingeniously constructed; the wood groining under the rood loft is bad in principle, as savouring too much of {64} stone construction; but the front of the loft is elaborately carved with tabernacle-work and imagery. ”

“ If I could get possession of a loft on the main deck, well forward, just over the fore-hold, I could satisfy myself in a few hours, but the loft is rented by that crazy Frenchman who parades Montgomery Street every afternoon, and though old Pike County wants to turn him out, I'm afraid I can't get it for a week to come. ”

“ The house itself is of almost bewildering extent, insomuch that we might each of us have a suite of rooms individually. I have established myself on the ground-floor, where I have a dressing-room, a large vaulted saloon, hung with yellow damask, and a square writing-study, the walls and ceilings of the two latter apartments being ornamented with angels and cherubs aloft in fresco, and with temples, statues, vases, broken columns, peacocks, parrots, vines, and sunflowers below. ”

“ At the head of the room furthest from the windows a screen was set, and a sort of low partition about midway the length of the loft hemmed in the projection room.
When things had settled into a routine, and on rainy days, we rehearsed and worked out scenarios up in our loft. We also had the costumes delivered there. The loft was always accessible, and we spent many evenings seeing projections and getting our things together for an early morning start. ”

“ This can be nailed to a square foundation piece and hung angle up on the wall of the loft. The slanting sides afford no lodging for droppings and as only one bird at a time can perch on so small a place, quarrelling is avoided. ”

“ They ascend, and enter a long, low loft, so completely crowded with rough bedsteads that there remains but a narrow alley between them, just sufficient to allow a single person to pass. Eight double beds, and the ceiling so low that the companion of Hans can scarcely stand upright with his hat on. ”

“ A grand ball is in progress in the salon of the mansion which the Man has built for himself. The scene is a large, square, lofty room with smooth, white walls and ceiling and a polished floor. Yet a certain discrepancy in the proportions of some of the minor features of the apartment conveys to the beholder a sort of vague, unsatisfactory impression, as though something were wanting, or discordant, or superfluous, or bizarre—one cannot exactly tell which. ”

“ Still another method is to rent a large empty room somewhere, usually a sort of loft at the top of a house, and furnish it one's self. This is a popular plan among the girls in the art schools who wish a home and studio combined. ”

“ In the upper loft is a large room where the care-takers reside, and where the boys who wish to read, write, or reflect may retire from the jabbering and confusion below. Whenever they leave their house or shop, they are required to go two abreast and keep step with each other. ”

“ Modern apartment dwellers boast neither attic nor cellar, to say nothing of a farmer's barn loft. Moreover, we all must scramble so fast to earn our daily bread that we have no time to make over the old ”

“ The inhabited rooms of the house are tiled two-thirds of the way to the lofty ceilings; the floors are of variegated marbles, and the ceilings are a mass of wood in the most intricate arabesque carving, and painted in colors as softly blended as the hues of an ancient camels’ hair shawl. In one of these gorgeous apartments, the furniture of which is not at all in keeping with the decorations (an incongruity which one sees constantly in the East—shabbiness and splendor are indissolubly married) , we are received by the Descendant with all the ceremony of Eastern hospitality. ”

“ They were, I doubt not, happy enough in their dark stalls, because they were horses, and had plenty to eat; and I was at times quite happy enough in the dark loft above, because I was a man, and could think and imagine. ”

“ You now begin your journey through vast, lofty, magnificently marbled, and very ill-furnished apartments, of which, before you have completed the half circuit of a single floor, you are heartily tired, for, beyond the architecture, there is nothing to see. ”

“ Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? ”

“ The apartments of the better sort are large and lofty, the floors paved with brick, the roofs covered with a thick coat of stucco, and the walls whitewashed. People of distinction hang their chambers with damask, striped silk, painted cloths, tapestry, or printed linnen. ”

“ The lofty ceilings and massive walls formed outlines of strength and beauty to the large and well-ventilated apartments, which made it easy to render them almost palatial by the means of such accessories and appliances as wealth commands, and which were lavished in this instance. ”

“ Usually there are no partition walls except in the lower stories, and these lofty upper apartments, especially if over dwellings, have their flattened dome-shaped roofs supported by a series of columns and arches artistically wrought and decorated, and their interiors adorned with growing flower and statuary, so as to furnish a delightful resort, convenient to the neighborhood and open to all. ”

“ I repeat, let no man think I have disclosed the weaknesses of the neighborhood, nor rashly open that closet which contains the secret skeleton of his dwelling. My carpets have been altered to fit all sized odd-shaped apartments from parallelopiped to hexagons. Much of my furniture has been distributed among my former dwellings. These limbs have stretched upon uncarpeted floors, or have been let down suddenly from imperfectly established bedsteads. I have dined in the parlor and slept in the back kitchen. ”

“ I had now time for a survey of the apartment; and, generally speaking, a drawing-room is no bad indication of the tastes and temperament of the owners of the establishment.
The practised eye speedily detects in the character and arrangement of a chamber something of its occupant. In some houses, the absence of all decoration, the simple puritanism of the furniture, bespeaks the life of quiet souls whose days are as devoid of luxury as their dwellings. You read in the cold grey tints the formal stiffness and unrelieved regularity around the Quaker-like flatness of their existence. ”

“ When the man who owned that seven-story tenement found that he could rent another floor, he found no difficulty in persuading the guardians of our building laws to let him clap another story on the roof, like a cabin on the deck of a ship; and in the southeasterly of the four apartments on this floor the little seamstress lived. You could just see the top of her window from the street—the huge cornice that had capped the original front, and that served as her window-sill now, quite hid all the lower part of the story on top of the top-story. ”

“ I know what it is to live in a cottage with a deal floor and roof, and a hearth of mica slate; and I know it to be in many respects healthier and happier than living between a Turkey carpet and gilded ceiling, beside a steel grate and polished fender. ”

“ We wander at will through the once splendid apartments, now in pitiable decay and ruin. In the banqueting hall—a vast apartment with high open-beamed roof and minstrel gallery—a washerwoman is heating her water-pots, and piles of wool are stored in the Hall of State. But from the far greater number of the rooms the roof has wholly or partially disappeared and the rooks scold each other in the chimneys or caw hungrily among the sagging rafters. ”

“ The ceiling rises far into the roof. There is a deep recess in the wall occupied by a few pieces of old china, and a set of shelves laden with old books; and only see how abruptly the hearth-stone rises over the sanded floor, and how well the fashion of yonder old [Pg 358] oaken table agrees with that of the old oaken scrutoire in the opposite corner. Humble as my apartment may seem, it is a place of some little experience in the affairs of both this world and the other. It has seen three entire generations come into being and pass away, and it now shelters the scion of a fourth. ”

“ This house, in which no doors or windows are to be found, and which is entered through a square hole cut in the roof, is furnished throughout with an oriental luxury of which even the pashas themselves would be incapable of forming an idea. The great novelist's private study has a floor inlaid with young girl's teeth and hung with superb cashmere rugs that have been sent him by all the crowned heads of the universe. ”

“ Turning to the right and guiding one’s steps warily over its icy surface, converted into a mirror by the daily brush of the slave, one would have been ushered into the drawing room, an apartment high of ceiling, scant of furniture, also slippery of floor, extending perhaps fifty feet along the west side of the mansion. ”

“ And Triffitt’s flat was like this—you entered through a double door into a good-sized sitting-room, out of which two other rooms led—one went into a small kitchen and pantry; the other into the bedroom, at the side of which was a little bathroom. The windows of the bedroom opened on to a view of the street below; those of the sitting-room on to a square of garden, on the lawn of which tenants might disport themselves, more or less sadly, with tennis or croquet in summer. ”

“ Then comes the entre-sol, with low ceilings, short windows, and dwarf chambers; then succeed a succession of floors, or stories, rising one above the other, to the number of Mahomet’s heavens. Each floor is like a distinct mansion, complete in itself, with ante-chamber, saloons, dining and sleeping rooms, kitchen and other conveniences for the accommodation of a family. Some floors are divided into two or more suites of apartments. Each apartment has its main door of entrance, opening upon the staircase, or landing-places, and locked like a street door. ”