"Dear Sir,--We would like to secure our old rooms in your house for the whole of July and August. As we shall remain so long a time, we hope you may be willing to count all the children at half-price. Last year, you may remember, we paid full price for the two eldest, the twins, who are not yet quite fourteen. I hope, also, that Mrs. ---- has better arrangements for washing this summer, and will allow us to have our own servant to do the washing for the whole family. If these terms suit you, the price for my family--eight children, myself, and servant--would be $38.50 a week. Perhaps, if the servant takes the entire charge of my rooms, you would call it $37; as, of course, that would save the time of your own servants." Then the country landlord hesitates. He is not positively sure of filling all his rooms for the season. Thirty-seven dollars a week would be, he thinks, better than nothing. In his simplicity, he supposes that, if he confers, as he certainly does, a favor on Mrs.----, by receiving her great family on such low terms, she will be thoroughly well disposed toward him and his house, and will certainly not be over-exacting in matter of accommodations. In an evil hour, he consents; they come, and he begins to reap his reward. The twins are stout boys, as large as men, and much hungrier. The baby is a sickly child of eighteen months, and requires especial diet, which must be prepared at especial and inconvenient hours, in the crowded little kitchen. The other five children are average boys and girls, between the ages of three and twelve, eat certainly as much as five grown people, and make twice as much trouble. The servant is a slow, inefficient, impudent Irish girl, who spends the greater part of four days in doing the family washing, and makes the other servants uncomfortable and cross. If this were all; but this is not. Mrs.----, who writes to all her friends boastingly of the cheap summer quarters that she has found, and who gains by the village shop-keeper's scales a pound of flesh a week, habitually finds fault with the food, with the mattresses, with the chairs, with the rag-carpets, with every thing, in short, down to the dust and the flies, for neither of which last the poor landlord could be legitimately held responsible. This is not an exaggerated picture. Everybody who has boarded in country places in the summer has known dozens of such women. Every country landlord can produce dozens of such letters, and of letters still more exacting and unreasonable.