You come home (say you come in the evenin' and bring company with you); you press a button at the door, the door opens; touch another button, and the hall will be all lighted up, and so with every other room in the house. Some of these lights will be rosettes of light let into the wall, and some on 'em lamps behind white, and rose-tinted, and amber porcelain.
When you go upstairs to put on another coat, you touch a button, the electric elevator takes you to your room; and when you open the closet door, that lights the lamp in the closet; when you have found your coat and vest, shuttin' the door puts the light out.
In the mean time, your visitors down below are entertained by a selection from operatic or sacred music or comic songs from a phonograph on the parlor table. Or if they want to hear Gladstone debate, or Chauncey Depew joke, or Ingersoll lecture, or no matter what their tastes are, they can be gratified. The phonograph don't care; it will bring to 'em anything they call for.
Then, when they have got ready for dinner, a button is touched; the dinner comes down from the kitchen in the attic, where it wuz all cooked by electricity, baked, roasted, or biled, whatever it is.
When the vittles are put on the table, they are kept warm by electric warmin' furnaces.
They start up a rousin' fire in the open fireplace by pressin' a button, and if they git kinder warm, electric fans cool the air agin, though there hain't much chance of gittin' too warm, for electric thermostats regulate the atmosphere. But in the summer the fans come handy.
When dinner is over the dishes mount upstairs agin, and are washed by a electric automatic dish washer, and dried by a electric dish drier.
The ice for dinner is made by a miniature ammonia ice plant, which keeps the hull house cool in hot days and nights.
On washin' days the woman of the house throws the dirty clothes and a piece of soap into a tub, and electricity heats the water, rubs and cleanses the clothes, shoves 'em along and rings 'em through an electric ringer, and dries 'em in a electric dryin' oven, and then irons 'em by an electric ironin' machine.
If the female of the house wants to sew a little, she don't have to wear out her own vital powers a-runnin' that sewin' machine—no; electricity jest runs it for her smooth as a dollar.