There is in the galaxy of landladies quite another type, an exotic plant in the wondrously competent sisterhood, specimens of which may be found blooming here and there like some rare orchid. I mean the fragile, lady landlady, the clinging vine bereft of the supporting husband oak. Such was Mrs. Knoll, of Central Avenue, Indianapolis, a little, plump, rounded body, exceedingly bright, pleasant, intelligent, amiable, and helpless; all of which qualities shone from her very agreeable face and person. In her youth no doubt she was a type of beauty, and she remained very well preserved. "Life and vanity and disappointment had slipped away" (in the Thackerian words) from Dr. Knoll some years before; and his widow and only child, Miss Knoll, were left in possession of the old family home, and nothing more. They could not bear to leave it, that would "break their hearts," said good, ineffectual Mrs. Knoll; so it was viewed by them, unfortunately somewhat fallaciously, in the light of a possible support. The Doctor evidently was a man of books, and his widow had sought, more and more, companionship in reading. Life--the actual world about her, that is--, and vanity, but not disappointment, had, in a manner of speaking, slipped from her, too. And she had turned to that great world of shadows. "In books," she said, "I can choose my own company." She had plighted her troth in youth to Dickens and to Thackeray, and to these she had remained ever faithful. In a world of false books and unsafe friends she knew that she had by the hand two true spirits. Jane Austen she loaned me with tremulous pleasure. And she was very fond of Mr. Howells, with whom, she said she lived a great deal; and the Kentons, the Laphams, and the Marches, were characters better known to her "than her next-door neighbors." But it must be confessed that the tender perfume of Mrs. Knoll was not altogether an equivalent in the sphere of her passive efforts to the homely vegetable odor of the authentic landlady.