As with the people, so with the houses.  Though they retain their positions, seldom abandoning the ground on which they were originally built, they change almost hourly their appearance and their uses,—­insomuch that the very solids of the city seem fluid, and even the stables are mutable,—­the horse-house of last week being an office for the sale of patents, or periodicals, or lottery-tickets, this week, with every probability of becoming an oyster-cellar, a billiard-saloon, a cigar-store, a barber’s shop, a bar-room, or a faro-bank, next week.  And here is another astonishment.  You will observe that the palatial museums for the temporary preservation of fossil or fungous penmen join walls, virtually, with habitations whose architecture would reflect no credit on the most curious hamlet in tide-water Virginia.  To your amazement, you learn that all these houses, thousands in number, are boarding-houses.  Of course, where everybody is a stranger, nobody keeps house.  It would be pardonable to suppose, that, out of so many boarding-houses, some would be in reality what they are in name.  Nothing can be farther from the fact.  These houses contain apartments more or less cheerless and badly furnished, according to the price (always exorbitant, however small it may be) demanded for them, and are devoted exclusively to the storage of empty bottles and demijohns, to large boxes of vegetable- and flower-seeds, to great piles of books, speeches, and documents not yet directed to people who will never read them, and to an abominable odor of boiling cabbages.  This odor steals in from a number of pitch-dark tunnels and shafts, misnamed passages and staircases, in which there are more books, documents, and speeches, other boxes of seeds, and a still stronger odor of cabbages.  The piles of books are traps set here for the benefit of the setters of broken legs and the patchers of skinless shins, and the noisome odors are propagated for the advantage of gentlemen who treat diseases of the larynx and lungs.

It would appear, then, that the so-called boarding-houses are, in point of fact, private gift-book stores, or rather, commission-houses for the receiving and forwarding of a profusion of undesirable documents and vegetations.  You may view them also in the light of establishments for the manufacture and distribution of domestic perfumery, payment for which is never exacted at the moment of its involuntary purchase, but is left to be collected by a doctor,—­who calls upon you during the winter, levies on you with a lancet, and distrains upon your viscera with a compound cathartic pill.