  F Fox's cheerful "Book of Martyrs" strikes us as incomplete. He tells, to be sure, of people who have been roasted alive, cut up, torn limb from limb, disembowelled, and suffered various other trifling annoyances of that kind; but though I have perused it carefully, I see no mention of the unhappy wretch who, coming home at twelve o'clock at night, with frozen fingers, gropes round his room, bumping his nose, and extinguishing his eyes, in the vain search for his match-box, the latitude and longitude of which some dastardly miscreant has changed. Nor do I see any mention of him who, having washed his hands nicely, looketh in vain for a towel, where a towel should be, while little rivulets of water run up his shirt-sleeves or drip from his extended finger-tips. No allusion either is made to her who, sitting down to her time-honored portfolio, misseth one sheet of MS. which somebody has fluttered out, and straightway gone his heedless way. Nor yet of the unhappy owner of a pen, whose pace answers only to one hand, and whose nib has been tampered with by some idle scribbler, in multiplying the name of "Laura," or "Matilda," to an indefinite extent, over a sheet of paper as blank as his mind. I see no mention of her who, sitting down to write, is made frantic by the everlasting grind of a hand-organ beneath the window; that performer's welcome retreat being followed by a shaky old man with a wheezy flute, or the more horrible bagpipe performance, compared with which the shrieks of twenty cur-tailed cats were heaven's own music. I have not noticed any mention of her who, giving her husband a letter to drop into the post, finds the same a month afterwards in the pocket of a vest, which he tosses her to mend. I see no mention of the lady-victims of owners of shops, three miles long, who have always "just the article you want" at the very farthest extremity of the store; and whom they lure to traverse that distance only to find something in the shopman's view "infinitely superior," but about as near the article wanted as is the North to the South pole. No mention either is made of the gentleman with a bran new coat, who takes the last seat in the car, next a child fond of wriggling, with a piece of soft gingerbread or a moist stick of candy in its uncertain gripe. Nor is any allusion made to the friend of the family, who furnishes all the children with holiday toys, every one of which has either a crucifying squeak or a stunning explosive power, which soon fits their amiable mother for a lunatic asylum. Nothing is said, as I can find, of that mistress of a family to whom the morning hours are as precious as gold dust, and who is called down to see a gentleman, who (having read Jones on the door-plate) straightway, with sublime assurance, asks "for Mrs. Jones, on particular business;" when that lady, descending, finds a well-dressed, well-groomed individual, who, with a smirk and a bow, straightway draws from his pocket "a bottle of furniture polish," which he exhausts all the dictionary and her patience in extolling; or presents to her notice a "cement for broken china," or "samples of needles." Scarcely has she rid herself of this nuisance, when "a boy wishes also to see Mrs. Jones on particular business," which turns out to be the hoped-for sale of "six envelopes, two steel-pens, a pencil, a brass breast-pin, a tin trumpet, a corkscrew, and four sheets of letter-paper—all for sixpence—and just sold three next door, mum." Is not the boarding-house public an army of martyrs? As to boarding-house life, I detest it every way: its public feeding, its scandal, its heterogeneousness, its tyrannical edicts against babies and young children, its stifling atmosphere of roast, and boil, and stew, and tobacco-smoke, its punctual delivery of your letters and parcels, on the entry table; its way of sweeping your room at most inconvenient hours, and dusting it with one summary whisk from a long-handled, feather-tailed switch; its convenient deafness to the jerk of your bell-wire; its homoeopathic coffee and pie; its towels, threadbare in quality, and niggardly in quantity; its parlor, showy and shabby, with its inevitable centre-table, with its perennial annuals, its hump-backed rocking-chair, and distorted pictures—and apoplectic bills. The necessity it entails of always wearing a mask; of fearing to speak, lest you should tread on the toes of your neighbor's pet hobby, and thereby deprive yourself of the convenient bridge over which the salt and pepper must necessarily travel to your plate, waiters being stupid and scarce; the bore of talking when you feel taciturn, or having your neighbor provokingly insist upon it that you must be ill; the bore of laughing when you feel sad, and hearing threadbare topics rediscussed, and stale jokes resurrectionized; the misery of never being able to have the first unfolding of your own morning-paper, or of having it incontinently disappear, in company with some unprincipled boarder bound on a daybreak journey, and that day sure to be aggravatingly dull and rainy; the necessity of always turning your keys upon boxes and trunks, and the certainty of losing or misplacing them when you are in a double-twisted, insane hurry; your contracted, closetless space; your inevitable city window prospect of back sheds, with ghostly garments hanging on groaning clothes-lines; of distracted bachelors at upper chamber-windows, vainly essaying to sew on missing buttons, and muttering inaudible oaths at their clumsy, needle-pricked fingers. Now, if you needs must board, go to the biggest and best hotel you can find, where everybody is too much occupied to interfere with your personal business; where waiters are plenty, and it is not high treason to ask for salt with your meat. If your finances forbid this, then, in mercy to yourself, rent a shanty where no third person is a fixture in your family, where you can sneeze when your nose has a call that way, and where your hopes and fears, joys and sorrows will not be leisurely dissected by the cool fingers of malignity, and where that nightmare, Paul Pry-ism, is not always astride of your heart and brain. That's my opinion of boarding-houses, and may the gods have mercy on the bored. Let us have a new edition of Fox at once.
An Error To Avoid.—All writers do best who depict that which they have seen with their own eyes, instead of their "mind's eye." It is very easy to detect the difference. There is a glow, a naturalness, a fidelity to life in the first, that is never to be found in the last. And yet how many, stepping past their own legitimate points of observation, and looking only through the fog of imagination, give us dim, distorted, crude caricatures of life and human beings, the counterpart of which never has and never will exist. This is especially the fault of beginners, whose misdirected aim it is to startle and astonish.
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