salt-sick sailor's call for a lemon or a raw potato,
or, if you will, as those capricious "longings," which have a certain
meaning, we may suppose, and which at any rate we think it reasonable to
satisfy if we can.

I was going to say something about our boarders the other day when I got
run away with by my local reminiscences. I wish you to understand that
we have a rather select company at the table of our boarding-house.

Our Landlady is a most respectable person, who has seen better days, of
course,--all landladies have,--but has also, I feel sure, seen a good
deal worse ones. For she wears a very handsome silk dress on state
occasions, with a breastpin set, as I honestly believe, with genuine
pearls, and appears habitually with a very smart cap, from under which
her gray curls come out with an unmistakable expression, conveyed in the
hieratic language of the feminine priesthood, to the effect that while
there is life there is hope. And when I come to reflect on the many
circumstances which go to the making of matrimonial happiness, I cannot
help thinking that a personage of her present able exterior, thoroughly
experienced in all the domestic arts which render life comfortable,
might make the later years of some hitherto companionless bachelor very
endurable, not to say pleasant.

The condition of the Landlady's family is, from what I learn, such as to
make the connection I have alluded to, I hope with delicacy, desirable
for incidental as well as direct reasons, provided a fitting match could
be found. I was startled at hearing her address by the familiar name
of Benjamin the young physician I have referred to, until I found on
inquiry, what I might have guessed by the size of his slices of pie and
other little marks of favoritism, that he was her son. He has recently
come back from Europe, where he has topped off his home training with
a first-class foreign finish. As the Landlady could never have educated
him in this way out of the profits of keeping boarders, I was not
surprised when I was told that she had received a pretty little property
in the form of a bequest from a former boarder, a very kind-hearted,
worthy old gentleman who had been long with her and seen how hard she
worked for food and clothes for herself and this son of hers, Benjamin
Franklin by his baptismal name. Her daughter had also married well, to
a member of what we may call the post-medical profession, that, namely,
which deals with the