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.
WRITING "COMPOSITIONS."
I have lately received a letter which it would be well every teacher and parent in the land should read. As I shall not betray the name or residence of the distressed young writer, of whom I have no knowledge except what is communicated by her letter, and as it may call attention to the last-drop-in-the-bucket misery, inflicted upon children already sufficiently overtasked, who are required to furnish ideas upon a given subject, which it is utterly impossible their young minds should grasp, I shall make no apology for transcribing it verbatim; calling particular attention to the italicized passages: