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 their houses, at last emptied, and vow a vow that never again will they take “city folks to board.”  But the great law of supply and demand is too strong for them.  The city must come out of itself for a few weeks, and get oxygen for its lungs, sunlight for its eyes, and rest for its overworked brain.  The country must open its arms, whether it will or not, and share its blessings.  And so the summers and the summerings go on, and there are always to be heard in the land the voices of murmuring boarders, and of landlords deprecating, vindicating.  We confess that our sympathies are with the landlords.  The average country landlord is an honest, well-meaning man, whose idea of the profit to be made “off boarders” is so moderate and simple that the keepers of city boarding-houses would laugh it and him to scorn.  If this were not so, would he be found undertaking to lodge and feed people for one dollar or a dollar and a half a day?  Neither does he dream of asking them, even at this low price, to fare as he fares.  The “Excelsior” mattresses, at which they cry out in disgust, are beds of down in comparison with the straw “tick” on which he and his wife sleep soundly and contentedly.  He has paid $4.50 for each mattress, as a special concession to what he understands city prejudice to require.  The cheap painted chamber-sets are holiday adorning by the side of the cherry and pine in the bedrooms of his family.  He buys fresh meat every day for dinner; and nobody can understand the importance of this fact who is not familiar with the habit of salt-pork and codfish in our rural districts.  That the meat is tough, pale, stringy is not his fault; no other is to be bought.  Stetson, himself, if he dealt with this country butcher, could do no better.  Vegetables?  Yes, he has planted them.  If we look out of our windows, we can see them on their winding way.  They will be ripe by and by.  He never tasted peas in his life before the Fourth of July, or cucumbers before the middle of August.  He hears that there are such things; but he thinks they must be “dreadful unhealthy, them things forced out of season,”—­and, whether healthy or not, he can’t get them.  We couldn’t ourselves, if we were keeping house in the same township.  To be sure, we might send to the cities for them, and be served with such as were wilted to begin with, and would arrive utterly unfit to be eaten at end of their day’s journey, costing double their market price in the added express charge.  We should not do any such thing.  We should do just as he does, make the best of “plum sauce,” or even dried apples.  We should not make our sauce with molasses, probably; but he does not know that sugar is better; he honestly likes molasses best.  As