Existing comment:
"Our big city, grown up so strangely like a gourd all in a night; places which never before dreamed of being honored by an inhabitant save dogs, cats, and rats, are converted into 'elegantly furnished rooms for rent,' and people actually live in them with all the city airs of people really living in respectable houses, and I suspect many of them do not know what they are positively living in sheds, but we, who have become familiar with every old roof years agone, know perfectly well what shelters them."
-- Clara Barton, letter to a wife of an army surgeon, December 24, 1861 |