we were to have for each meal on the rest of the days, but after
the novelty of this wore off there began to be something really deadly
about the exactness of this household machinery and the certainty of our
calculations.

The prospect of Tuesday's stew, for instance, was not a thing to be
disregarded or lightly disposed of. It assumed a definite place in the
week's program as early as two o'clock on Sunday afternoon, and even
when Tuesday was lived down and had linked itself to the past, the
memory of its cuisine lingered and lay upon us until we even fancied
that the very walls of our two plush upholstered rooms were tinged and
tainted and permeated with the haunting sorrow of a million Tuesday
stews.

It is true that we were no longer subject to janitorial dictation, or to
the dumb-waiter complications which are often distressing to those who
live at the top of the house and get the last choice of the meat and ice
deliveries, but our landlady and the boarders we had always with us.

The former was a very stout person and otherwise afflicted with
Christian science and a weak chest. It did not seem altogether
consistent that she should have both, though we did not encourage a
discussion of the matter. We were willing that she should have as many
things as she could stand up under if she only wouldn't try to divide
them with us.

I am sure now that some of the other boarders must have been
discourteous and even harsh with this unfortunate female, and that by
contrast we appeared sympathetic and kind. At least, it seemed that she
drifted to us by some natural process, and evenings when I wanted to
read, or be read to by the Little Woman, she blew in to review the story
of her ailments and to expound the philosophy which holds that all the
ills of life are but vanity and imagination. Perhaps her ailments _may_
have been all imagination and vanity, but they did not seem so to us.
They seemed quite real. Indeed they became so deadly real in time that
more than once we locked our doors after the Precious Ones were asleep,
turned out the gas, and sat silent and trembling in darkness until the
destroying angel should pass by.

I have spoken of the boarders. They too laid their burdens upon us. For
what reason I can only conjecture. They brought us their whole stock of
complaints--complaints of the landlady, of the table and of each other.
Being from the great wide West we may have seemed a bit more broadly
human than mo