e oldest inhabitants are here to-day
and gone tomorrow, as punctually, if not as poetically, as the Arabs of
Mr. Longfellow. A few remain,--parasitic growths, clinging tenaciously
to the old haunts. Like tartar on the teeth, they are proof against the
hardest rubs of the tooth-brush of Fortune.

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