On my return I paid fivepence for a “cabin,” took my receipt for the same in the form of a huge brass check, and went upstairs to the smoking-room.  Here, a couple of small billiard tables and several checkerboards were being used by young working-men, who waited in relays for their turn at the games, while many men were sitting around, smoking, reading, and mending their clothes.  The young men were hilarious, the old men were gloomy.  In fact, there were two types of men, the cheerful and the sodden or blue, and age seemed to determine the classification.

But no more than the two cellar rooms did this room convey the remotest suggestion of home.  Certainly there could be nothing home-like about it to you and me, who know what home really is.  On the walls were the most preposterous and insulting notices regulating the conduct of the guests, and at ten o’clock the lights were put out, and nothing remained but bed.  This was gained by descending again to the cellar, by surrendering the brass check to a burly doorkeeper, and by climbing a long flight of stairs into the upper regions.  I went to the top of the building and down again, passing several floors filled with sleeping men.  The “cabins” were the best accommodation, each cabin allowing space for a tiny bed and room alongside of it in which to undress.  The bedding was clean, and with neither it nor the bed do I find any fault.  But there was no privacy about it, no being alone.

To get an adequate idea of a floor filled with cabins, you have merely to magnify a layer of the pasteboard pigeon-holes of an egg-crate till each pigeon-hole is seven feet in height and otherwise properly dimensioned, then place the magnified layer on the floor of a large, barnlike room, and there you have it.  There are no ceilings to the pigeon-holes, the walls are thin, and the snores from all the sleepers and every move and turn of your nearer neighbours come plainly to your ears.  And this cabin is yours only for a little while.  In the morning out you go.  You cannot put your trunk in it, or come and go when you like, or lock the door behind you, or anything of the sort.  In fact, there is no door at all, only a doorway.  If you care to remain a guest in this poor man’s hotel, you must put up with all this, and with prison regulations which impress upon you constantly that you are nobody, with little soul of your own and less to say about it.

Now I contend that the least a man who does his day’s work should have is a room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in his possessions; where he can sit down and read by a window or look out; where he can come and go whenever he wishes; where he can accumulate a few personal belongings other than those he carries about with him on his back and in his pockets; where he can hang up pictures of his mother, sister, sweet-heart, ballet dancers, or bulldogs, as his heart listeth—­in short, one place of his own on the earth of which he can say:  “This is mine, my castle; the world stops at the threshold; here am I lord and master.”  He will be a better citizen, this man; and he will do a better day’s work.