Outside, however, poppa found it difficult to approve the facade.

To throw four galleries over the street door, he said, with no visible means of getting into them or possible object for sitting there, was about the most ridiculous waste of building space he had yet observed.
"But then," said Dicky Dod, who kept his disconsolate place by my side, "they didn't seem to know how to waste enough in those pre-elevator days.

Look at the pictures and the bronzes and the marble columns inside there--ten times as much as they had any use for.

They just heaped it up." "That's so, Dicky, my boy," replied poppa; "we could cover more ground with the money in our century.

But you've got to remember that they hadn't any other way worth mentioning of spending the taxes.