The Lay of the Band 
fifth flight up. And what of a home that cannot be 
remembered as a song! It is not a home, but only a 
floor over your head, a floor under your feet, a hole 
in the wall of the street, a burrow into which you 
are dumped by a hoisting machine. It is warm in- 
side ; Eve is with you, and the baby, and your books. 
But you do not hear the patter of the rain upon the 
roof, nor the murmur of the wind in the trees; you 
do not see the sun go down beyond the wooded hills, 
nor ever feel the quiet of the stars. You have no 
largeness round about you; you are the centre of 
nothing ; you have no garden, no harvest, no chores, 
—no home! There is not room enough about a city 
flat for a home, nor chores enough in city life for a 
living. 
For a man’s life consisteth not in an abundance of 
things, but in the particular kind and number of his 
chores. A chore is a fragment of real life that is 
lived with the doing. All real living must be lived ; 
it cannot be bought or hired. And herein is another 
serious problem in city life, —it is the tragedy of city 
life that it is so nearly all lived for us. We hire 
Tom, Dick, and Harry to live it; we buy it of the 
butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. It is not. 
50 
