Then the country landlord hesitates.  He is not positively sure of filling all his rooms for the season.  Thirty-seven dollars a week would be, he thinks, better than nothing.  In his simplicity, he supposes that, if he confers, as he certainly does, a favor on Mrs.——­, by receiving her great family on such low terms, she will be thoroughly well disposed toward him and his house, and will certainly not be over-exacting in matter of accommodations.  In an evil hour, he consents; they come, and he begins to reap his reward.  The twins are stout 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.