boys, as large as men, and much
hungrier. The baby is a sickly child of eighteen months, and requires
especial diet, which must be prepared at especial and inconvenient hours,
in the crowded little kitchen. The other five children are average boys
and girls, between the ages of three and twelve, eat certainly as much as
five grown people, and make twice as much trouble. The servant is a slow,
inefficient, impudent Irish girl, who spends the greater part of four days
in doing the family washing, and makes the other servants uncomfortable
and cross.

If this were all; but this is not. Mrs.----, who writes to all her friends
boastingly of the cheap summer quarters that she has found, and who gains
by the village shop-keeper's scales a pound of flesh a week, habitually
finds fault with the food, with the mattresses, with the chairs, with the
rag-carpets, with every thing, in short, down to the dust and the flies,
for neither of which last the poor landlord could be legitimately held
responsible. This is not an exaggerated picture. Everybody who has boarded
in country places in the summer has known dozens of such women. Every
country landlord can produce dozens of such letters, and of letters still
more exacting and unreasonable.

The average city man or woman who goes to a country house to board, goes
expecting what it is in the nature of things impossible that they should
have. The man expects to have boots blacked and hot water ready, and a
bell to ring for both. What experienced country boarder has not laughed in
his sleeve to see such an one, newly arrived, putting his head out
snappingly, like a turtle, from his doorway, and calling to chance
passers, "How d'ye get at anybody in this house?"

If it is a woman, she expects that the tea will be of the finest flavor,
and never boiled; that steaks will be porter-house steaks; that green peas
will be in plenty; and that the American girl, who is chambermaid for the
summer, and school-teacher in the winter, and who, ten to one, could put
her to the blush in five minutes by superior knowledge on many subjects,
will enter and leave her room and wait upon her at the table with the
silent respectfulness of a trained city servant.

This is all very silly. But it happens. At the end of every summer
hundreds of disappointed city people go back to their homes grumbling
about country food and country ways. Hundreds of tired and discouraged
wives of country landlords sit down in th