A school has been called a miniature world; a boarding-house is much more truly entitled so, since within its walls rage all the passions, the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, that rack humanity. Glance along the table when its inmates are assembled. How many virtues and vices are reflected in the different countenances that meet the eye! There is an old man, happy in the knowledge of a well-spent life; seated next him, may be seen one of half his years, already bowed by sorrow, which his own vices have occasioned. Near him an innocent girl, shrinking involuntarily from her neighbor, with the instinctive antipathy of virtue for vice. Next to her a widow, who, before her mourning weeds are thrown aside, forgets the departed one she had once professed to love so deeply. Here a wife, who heedless of matronly dignity, flirts with every brainless fop, with the careless gayety of a school-girl. There a blushing bride, dreaming only of a blissful future, while _vis a vis_ with a constituent, a politician discusses the probable results of the next election, and beholds the profitable office he toils for within his grasp. Near him sits a poet, with pale, intellectual brow, revolving in his mind the dazzling thoughts that shall live hereafter on the “deathless page,” while his nearest neighbor, an anxious merchant, hastily swallows his food, to return to his toil before the shrine of Mammon. There an uxorious old man watches, with jealous eyes, the words and smiles of his giddy young bride. Here an old woman disfigures the beauty of age, and turns the reverence it excites to ridicule, by aping in dress and manner the youth which she can never recall. Her shriveled neck covered with thin gauze, the glittering jewels on her bony hands, the rouge on her wrinkled and sunken cheeks, the gay silks that mock the silvery hairs that peep from beneath the ebon colored wig, betray the paltry vanity of a weak mind, and make me sigh to see age deform itself in such a masquerade. Even so might I proceed through the whole list on my landlady’s books; but I must cease mere speculation, for I promised to relate some of the incidents that have occurred within my walls—such histories as I have heard.