Which reminds me to say, that in looking over the advertising columns, a few mornings since, I observed a card published by some party who desired boarders--"a gentleman and lady without encumbrances." Of course the "encumbrances" are children. I protest against the application of the term. If there be anything in the world which can make stale bread and hash palatable, it is a child. If there be anything which can bring a ray of sunshine into the dreary, gloomy desert of a boarding house, it is a child. I am bound to protest against this opposition to children, which is growing fiercer every day. Occasionally you will find a family with soul enough in its collective breast to admit a party with one child, with a mental reservation that they are entitled to a crown of glory for so doing. But what are those fond parents, whose nest is full of these lively and demonstrative pledges of conjugal affection, to do? A house which has not a little blue and gold edition of humanity, fluttering through its rooms, dancing, singing, and crowing, as full of love as an egg is of meat, whose sky is all sunshine, or at most overcast by the thinnest of April clouds, sounding a jubilant peal of ecstasy in the morning, and making the coming night doubly holy and beautiful with its little prayer at evening, must be a very lonely house. A house which has not a little crib in the nursery; a mutilated battalion of dolls, minus legs, arms, and heads, looking for all the world as though they had just come from some Lilliputian battle; marvelous books, reciting the exploits of the matronly Goose, the good fortune of Cinderella, and the bad fortune of Polly Flinders, scattered about in every room, _sans_ covers, and tattered and torn; little blue and red shoes and striped stockings in the drawers; little fingerprints about the door-knobs and marks of juvenile industry everywhere, such as combs in the coal scuttle, carving knives in the molasses jug, tea spoons in the stoves, a family bible illustrated with pencil marks, intended by the youthful Raphael to be letters to some distant aunt, or _chefs d`oeuvres_ in natural history, sugar deftly mixed with the salt, Eau de Cologne in the slop jar, and your favorite arm chair harnessed with strings, and mustered into service as a horse-car--such a home must be as cheerful as the cell of a recluse.