This victim of a selfish and heartless custom has so well portrayed the annoyances that spring naturally from it, that few words of ours are needed. But, in justice to the writer, we must assure our readers that this is no fancy sketch; the half of what the landladies of these gratuitous hotels are called upon--no, compelled--to endure has not been told. Happy, if when sick, without help, or unable to afford to keep any, they do not find it necessary to furnish two or three extra meals, at different parts of the day, after the family have been fed, the table and dishes all cleansed, and the weary provider has just sat down to that large basket of long-delayed mending. Long delayed! And why? Because the time and strength which might have been given to that work have been frittered away for those who have no legitimate claim upon either, and who, perhaps, taking notes of everything which their presence compels the lady of the house to neglect, go away and requite her hospitality by criticising her housekeeping and remarking upon her inefficiency! Or it may be, these long-suffering ladies are rung up at midnight to receive unscrupulous and untimely guests; or, instead of one child to look after, they are expected to act as nurse to three or four. We have tried and known it all, and confess _we don’t like it_. Aside from the fatigue and inconvenience, the pecuniary tax is often much heavier than the poor victim can afford to pay. We think the meanest kind of pilfering is that practised by self-constituted guests. We would ride, in the darkest night, over the roughest corduroy roads ever seen at the West in her earliest days, until we found a _log-tavern_, on the edge of a “clearing,” with no private room, no eatable food, and a bed already fully inhabited, before we would thus trespass on any one upon whom we had not strong claims of hearty love or relationship, and especially without warning. And one who has ever tried this alternative, will acknowledge that we could not well express our abhorrence of the practice of “visiting for one’s own convenience” more forcibly.