I must have been singularly fortunate in regard to landladies, or else they are a very much maligned class. I have had a good deal to do with them, and, on the whole, I have found them kind, obliging, and the very reverse of extortionate. With country landladies, especially, I have ever been most comfortable, and even among London ones, who, as a class, are not so pleasant as their provincial sisters, I have never, as yet, come across a single specimen of that terrible she-dragon about which I have heard so much. To champion the cause of landladies is rather an extraordinary proceeding, but, as so much is said against them, I think it only fair to state my own experience. They have their faults. They bully the slavey (but then the slavey sauces them, so perhaps it is only tit for tat), they will fry chops, and they talk enough for an Irish M. P. They persist in telling you all their troubles, and they keep you waiting for your breakfast while they do it. They never tire of recounting to you all they have done for some ungrateful relative, and they bring down a drawerful of letters on the subject, which they would like you to cast your eye through. They bore you to death every day, too, with a complete record of the sayings and doings of some immaculate young man lodger they once had. This young man appears to have been quite overweighted with a crushing sense of the goodness of the landlady in question. Many and many a time has he said to her, with tears in his eyes: “Ah, Mrs. So-and-so, you have been more than a mother to me”; and then he has pressed her hand, and felt he could never repay her kindness. Which seems to have been the fact, for he has generally gone off, in the end, owing a pretty considerable sum. CHAPTER XIV. With a Stock Company, [Illustration: 9135] WAS most miserable with the company I had now joined. What it was like may be gathered from the following: