anced to meet him "professionally" engaged.
As a result of this extreme detachment from things material, the house
ran itself, or was run by incompetent Irish and negro "help." There were
no bells in the rooms, which simplified the service, and nothing could be
ordered out of meal hours.

The material defects in board and lodging sink, however, into
insignificance before the moral and social unpleasantness of an
establishment such as this. All ages, all conditions, and all creeds are
promiscuously huddled together. It is impossible to choose whom one
shall know or whom avoid. A horrible burlesque of family life is
enabled, with all its inconveniences and none of its sanctity. People
from different cities, with different interests and standards, are
expected to "chum" together in an intimacy that begins with the eight
o'clock breakfast and ends only when all retire for the night. No
privacy, no isolation is allowed. If you take a book and begin to read
in a remote corner of a parlor or piazza, some idle matron or idiotic
girl will tranquilly invade your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of
her affairs and the day's gossip. There is no escape unless you mount to
your ten-by-twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they
visit Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, for want of any other
conveniences. Even such retirement is resented by the boarders. You are
thought to be haughty and to give yourself airs if you do not sit for
twelve consecutive hours each day in unending conversation with them.

When one reflects that thousands of our countrymen pass at least one-half
of their lives in these asylums, and that thousands more in America know
no other homes, but move from one hotel to another, while the same outlay
would procure them cosy, cheerful dwellings, it does seem as if these
modern Arabs, Holmes's "Folding Bed-ouins," were gradually returning to
prehistoric habits and would end by eating roots promiscuously in caves.

The contradiction appears more marked the longer one reflects on the love
of independence and impatience of all restraint that characterize our
race. If such an institution had been conceived by people of the Old
World, accustomed to moral slavery and to a thousand petty tyrannies, it
would not be so remarkable, but that we, of all the races of the earth,
should have created a form of torture unknown to Louis XI. or to the
Spanish Inquisitors, is indeed inexplicable! Out