aliu baid Jiསས, མས་ ས
dispensed, at a cost varying from twenty shillings to three
dollars per week. A preposterous limit, possibly you think,
these two extremes of price; but to him who puts small
money in his purse, and that only from the daily coinings of
a low-priced brain-(the forced product of an unproductive
soil)-it is a perfect Zahara of distance, and the choice be-
tween is matter of serious and ponderous deliberation.

The cracked bell in the nail has sent forth its sound, indicating that "the wittles is up," and the succeedant rush of strong-stomached-expectants has taken place, so we can enter quietly. I'll not give you an introduction to my fellow-sufferers now; that treat I propose to hold in store for a future occasion, merely saying, par parenthese, that every one of them is a pocket-volume of very plain print It hath pleased sundry philosophers to reason learnedly for you to study. Great entrepots of character, these cheap upon the manifold benefits which would accrue to man, if boarding-houses; they gather together, by mutual sympathy, he had been created with more wants and desires, and with all the oddities of humanity; and these world-abused denithe more means and contrivances necessary to gratify them; zens are rare studies. But of them anon. For the present and many ingenious essays have been written in praise of cast your eye along the scanty-furnished length of that table, piling on additional organs to the human machine. But to innocent of cloth, and take an inventory of its fat things. me, calmly considering upon the matter, it doth apppear-On its bare board see, at protracted intervals, huge piles of

3

EVERY NUMBER EMBELLISHED WITH A STEEL ENGRAVING.

THREE DOLLARS A YEAR.

VOLUME II.

OFFICE OF PUBLICATION, ANN-STREET, NEAR BROADWAY.
NEW-YORK, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1843.

MY MOTHER'S BIBLE.

Written for Henry Russell by the author of 'Woodman, spare that tree.' (The music may be had of Firth & Hall.)

THIS book is all that's left me now!

Tears will unbidden start;

With faltering lip and throbbing brow,

I

press it to my heart.

For many generations pass'd,

Here is our family tree;

My mother's hands this Bible clasp'd;
She, dying, gave it me.

Ah! well do I remember those

Whose names these records bear:
Who round the hearth-stone used to close
After the evening prayer,
And speak of what these pages said,
In tones my heart would thrill!
Though they are with the silent dead,
Here are they living still!

My father read this holy book

To brothers, sisters dear;

How calm was my poor mother's look,
Who lean'd God's word to hear.

Her angel face-I see it yet!

What thronging memories come!
Again that little group is met
Within the halls of home!

Thou truest friend man ever knew,
Thy constancy I've tried;

Where all were false I found thee true,
My counsellor and guide.

The mines of earth no treasures give
That could this volume buy:
In teaching me the way to live,
It taught me how to die.

(COMMUNICATED.)

CHEAP BOARDING AND TRUE LOVE. THERE is one feature in the big face of this monstrous metropolis, oh most good-natured of Editors! that you ought daily to give thanks, on your bended knees, it has not been your fortune to see and understand. It has never been your calamity to date your whereabout from any one of those numberless human dens with which our city abounds, yclept-heaven save the mark!-cheap boarding-houses! To be boarded by a pirate is said to be perilous; I have never experienced it, and take the assertion upon trust; but to be boarded by a cheap landlady, is matter of life and death-I say it understandingly, for I know it. From the annihilating anathema which should be pronounced upon | this feature of our beloved city, I would of course exclude the Edgar-House, and sundry other equally respectable but less honoured receptacles of dowerless citizens, which, being without the pale of the "cheap," come not within the scope of my observation. I write of the mass-the majority-the cheap! those great uncivilized reservoirs in a civilized community. These do I hold in utter detestation, and speak from the records of a starved and protracted experience, when I write them down the imbodiments of discomfort, where vexations and stale bread, annoyances and foul meats, are bountifully dispensed, at a cost varying from twenty shillings to three dollars per week. A preposterous limit, possibly you think, these two extremes of price; but to him who puts small money in his purse, and that only from the daily coinings of a low-priced brain-(the forced product of an unproductive soil)—it is a perfect Zahara of distance, and the choice between is matter of serious and ponderous deliberation.

PAYABLE IN ADVANCE.

NUMBER 3

that, so far from being brought into this breathing world
with an additional member or members to our body corpo-
rate, it would have been vastly better, to some of us, at
least, had we made our appearance with still less than now,
which daily tax our ingenuity and industry to keep them
employed; and, had too bountiful Nature left closed the door
whereat go in our victuals, it would have been a monstrous
saving of time, labour, and property. The idea is worthy of
a philanthropist, and its effect in ameliorating the condition
of mankind would gladden the heart of a Wilberforce. It
is delightful to think of the accruing benefits, if men could
be formed to feed after the fabled fashion of the chamelion!
In all sincerity of heart, I do believe, that, supporting oneself
upon the fœtid and impure air of this great maelstroom of
humanity, even after it had floated over its three hundred
thousand destined human lungs, countless myriads of times,
would be infinitely more pleasant than to feed at the public
troughs of our landladies' uncleanly styes, and vastly more
economical. Of course, I speak not for those for whom a
silver spoon glimmered in bright perspective before they
opened their eyes, but for those who dig their sustenance
out of an ungrateful world without the assistance of any
spoon at all.

What a bottomless basket is this matter of eating! What
a horrible tax, collected by nature, unrelentingly and un-
sparingly, of every subject! "Tis the stamp-act of Crea-
tion, self-imposed, and must meet its instalments; but it is
saddening to think how eating has grown with our growth
and strengthened with our strength. We are all the bounden
slaves of appetite; we must eat; and, for one, I confess my-
self chain-bound to its will, and live in the desire for good
things. My palate, like the daughters of the horse-leech,
cries, "give! give!" I reverence the smell of savoury
viands; I venerate the sight of well-cooked meats; but I
more respect the taste of palate comestibles. Visions of de-
parted dinners are even now haunting the dim chambers of
memory, like ghosts of the departed and dearly loved; but,
alas! though they stay there, they stay not the stomach.
but,
Leeze me on fodder. A good dinner, I opine, is a marvel-
lous pleasant thing. I have eaten them, once or twice;
so far in the dingy bowels of the past, even the memory of
bills of fare," soiled and crumpled,
their particulars is digested and departed. I have lately
picked up the stray
swept from a well-kept hotel in my neighbourhood, by un-
thinking and tasteless varlets, and in some obscure corner
made exquisite imaginative-dinners from the remembered
names-less than " the bare remembrance of a feast!" Rare
dishes, then!-thought-purveyed and fancy-cooked! Deli-
cious meals! sans diminution of coin!

66

Entertaining these exalted notions of good dinners in particular, and wholesome eating in general, you shall judge of my daily bliss. Come with me to my feeding-house. Enter it in fancy, but avoid it in fact. You shall know one of We will these places-these cheap boarding-houses-by its dingy façade and dirty exteriour. Its very outer wall is an incentive to suicide. It looks the antipode of comfort. omit the locality of this particular one, as it is one of a class. See its well-worn step, partially covered with the remnant of an antiquated foot-mat, whose age is lost in antediluvian obscurity. Step daintily over the foul threshold, come at once into the (so called) parlour, and see my morning feed. The cracked bell in the hall has sent forth its melancholy sound, indicating that "the wittles is up," and the succeedant rush of strong-stomached-expectants has taken place, so we can enter quietly. I'll not give you an introduction to my fellow-sufferers now; that treat I propose to hold in store for a future occasion, merely saying, par parenthese, that every one of them is a pocket-volume of very plain print Great entrepots of character, these cheap It hath pleased sundry philosophers to reason learnedly for you to study. upon the manifold benefits which would accrue to man, if boarding-houses; they gather together, by mutual sympathy, he had been created with more wants and desires, and with all the oddities of humanity; and these world-abused denithe more means and contrivances necessary to gratify them; zens are rare studies. But of them anon. For the present and many ingenious essays have been written in praise of cast your eye along the scanty-furnished length of that table, piling on additional organs to the human machine. But to innocent of cloth, and take an inventory of its fat things. me, calmly considering upon the matter, it doth apppear-On its bare board see, at protracted intervals, huge piles of

musty bread, in Patagonian slices of most substantial thickness, whose pungent aroma speaks loudly of the sourness of the raw material; each pile flanked by a diminutive plate of ill-favoured butter, deadly pale, and white with an unquestioned sense of its own unworthiness, for "its offence is rank, it smells to heaven." At either end of the board are immense areas of black, leathery-looking beef, undoubtedly sliced from the body of some consumptive ox, who JONAS JONES is certainly not a name for boarding-school dropped, toil-exhausted, in the dog-days, and went quietly misses to go demented about; it predisposes you for noout of the world from the sheer lack of strength to breathe, thing romantic; it is, of itself, possibly, very commonplace, hard-worked and patient. (Regarding these same dishes- and should belong to a very stupid body; but it was, nevertake the advice of an experienced friend, and eschew them less, the veritable cognomen of one who was a living victim as you would an evil deed. Their caoutchouc integuments to romantic sensations-a peripatetic bundle of fine fanciesare not for those who have a horrour of dentists' bills. Cut of one whose brain was as bewilderingly active as a disturbyourself a pair of suspenders from them for your fishing || ed bee-hive, and whose heart, like an open tinder-box, was overhauls, if you please, but venture not upon the teeth-pe-ready to quicken to sudden and self-consuming fire at the riling task of eating.) In scattered sections over the wilder- veriest chance spark of beauty. It was all one to Jonas ness of board are little dishes of the chopped-up remnants of where the spark came from; no matter whether struck from yesterday's dinner, of which the dogs were cheated, floating the laughing eyes of a village belle, as her careless glance in rancid ponds of grease. These things, and these only, fell mirthfully upon him, in rustic sport on the greensward; constitute the breakfast of those hungry humans. I pass by, or whether glancing from the haughty stare of a city beauty, you perceive, that liquid at the top of the table-once Croton, as it flashed from under a fashionable bonnet on the unnonow an awful compound of villanous ingredients, which the ticed victim in the crowded thoroughfare of Broadway. It landlady regularly calls coffee, every morning, and brazen was all the same to Jonas. He went off at once under its falsehood chokes her not. I pass that liquor by, as unworthy influence, like a rocket from its match, into the ideal sky of of notice. Now, what think you of our breakfast? Ought dream-land, and there built magnificent airy-castles, with we not to grow fat and merry?* beauty's random glances for their corner-stones.

not be my fault. I will tell you now a story about one of them-a tale of true love and its roughness; for romances are enacted, as well as read, at twenty-shilling boardinghouses. Jonas Jones is my hero. He was a boarder-was -alas! that past tense is fatal. Hic jacet has not been written for him, but he has departed our circle. Let one || brief chapter of his history be written.

Jonas was a woman-worshipper, and his heart was ever on its bended knee to beauty. The chance glance of an eye; the accidental contact of a delicate gloved hand; nay, the very rustling of a silk dress, was matter for the daydreams of a week, and filled his fancy-peopled realm of thought for many a sleepless night. With this high-strung and inflammable temperament, Jonas was transplanted from the quiet of a far-away down-east village to the brilliant and noisy metropolis of New-York. Unhappy man! thy swimming brain reeled under the change-it was like throwing a cage-bred bird suddenly from the barrenness of its prisonhouse, untrammelled, into a wilderness of sunny flowers and scented blossoms; transferring Prometheus from his bed of rock, at once, to all the luxuries of Mahomet's heaven; and the very blessedness of the change wrought upon this unhackneyed spirit, till an intoxication of the heart was visible to the most careless observer as the sun at noonday.

Jonas' outer man was not a fit shrine for so delicate and easily perturbed a spirit. Sooth to say, he was plain, very plain-and the eye of beauty, unconscious and uncaring, glanced coldly over his passionless face, only to stir the scarce slumbering spirit within, without ever knowing a rebound from his unloved and unloveable exteriour; and up to the time of which we write, Jonas had never produced a sensation. Never had female heart fluttered for him, while he had been a sensitive plant to the whole sex.

There is one peculiarity attendant upon these phenomena of civilization, which I would fain notice in this connection. The exteriour of one of these caravans of humanity is peculiarly its own. It has an air, a look, which may not be confounded with any other house. Independent of its dirt, which might not inappropriately belong to some other habitation, it is sure to be plastered all over with dentists' and doctors' signs, its unfailing and unmistakeable attendants. Dentists are indigenous to cheap boarding-houses-they spring up, mushroom-like, whenever a cheap landlady opens; and then and there fleece the verdant portion of the boarders, till they amass pence enough to buy a big brass plate, with their name lyingly engraved thereon, which they forthwith affix to some too credulous landlord's door, and straightway become regular and respectable members of the profession. I hate these human-Thames-tunnel-men-working forever in the thoroughfare to your stomach, as if it were a continental highway-ramming their cold and uncouth tools in the avenue left open for one's fodder, as mercilessly and heartily as the city paviour, the dentist of roads, rams away upon the corporation's paving-stones. Kindred occupations they, though your city-road dentist is the more respectable and the least demoralizing. It is a question worthy the consideration of the moralist, why dentistry and chicanery be always in communion-why dentistry and cleatery be such invariable and indissoluble partners in trade-why the opening of others mouths should gradually but surely shut up the The day of Jonas' advent to the great city is marked with opener's heart. Bowels of compassion never had dentist. a white stone in his memory. His first appearance was at In their mushroom existence they have the best seat at table, the breakfast-table of our cheap boarding-house, where a the rarest slices of beef, and the sweetest smile of the daugh-considerate and penny-saving friend had secured him "a ter. They are acquainted, ex officio, with all the female local habitation"-alas, he had already "a name!" boarders, and have the entrée of their rooms at demoralizing hours. The dentists, in this particular house I have been writing of, I know, and hate correspondingly. I had it in serious comtemplation once to rid the house of them. My plan was a good one. I proposed to buy and train an elephant for the purpose; have the dentists put in their heads as well as hands for an examination of the elephant's capacious reservoir, or food depot, when he, trap-like, should close his massive jaw upon their brain-cases, and thus be rid of them at once, by a process which would need the coroner's attendance. The project was feasible and good, but the scheme fell through for lack of funds, and the dentists still live and thrive.

But, touching our boarders-you don't know them. The more's the pity. "Tis your misfortune, but I mean it shall

Now, it is a thousand chances to one, the eyes that look upon this page know not the paramount reason that often induces landladies to open cheap boarding-houses. But few are cognizant of the germ of these receptacles for men with decayed pockets, and youth of slender expectations. It is to most people an unknown thing, and, as it is necessary to a right understanding of this chapter in Jonas' history, I shall proceed to unravel what is generally a mystery-a sealed book to the uninitiated.

The odds always are, that the landlady elect has a daughter, more or less pretty, whose beautics waste their sweetness on the desert air, while they occupy a "second story back," in some obscure retreat, unknowing and unknown. The dismal matrimonial prospect from that unnoticed quarter is heart-sickening to the worldly mother, and, as a desperate fling for fortune, she coaxes some misjudging friend to be security for her rent, and affixing a rusty "BOARDING" * I have just quarrelled with my landlady, she having made her plate to the door, in some more frequented thoroughfare, she diurnal dun for my last month's board, which she seems very desi- launches at once into the art and mystery of practising how rous should be put in the way of liquidation. I look upon it as un- little and how poor will keep men alive;-her main object mannerly in her thus to dun a gentleman, and I am relieved and being to give her daughter an opportunity to display her ungratified by exposing her table to the public. If she continues imperappreciated beauties from the head of a table to the admiring tinent about "the trifling amount of my bill," I am determined to leave the house in disgust, and patronize some other establishment!

eyes of scores of clerks, thinking, possibly, some infatuated youth with a father, well to do in the country, may fall