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.
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