The erudite in landladies have, of course, cognizance of a class which are in no degree widows. Those of this department of the race, however, frequently are not landladies in fibre, but merely incidentally. They are young wives who for a transient period seek to help out in the domestic economy by taking a few lodgers who come with unexceptionable references. As wives doubtless they are meritorious; but no monument need be erected to them as landladies. Though I should like to see in the principal public square of every town and city a monument designed by an artist of ability placed to the enduring glory of the landladies of that place. For are not landladies ancient institutions fostering the public weal, and in their field not a whit less deserving of homage than governors and soldiers? I would say to a nation, show me your landladies and I will tell you your destiny. I should be remiss, however, in my chronicle did I not note that among these partial and ephemeral landladies occasionally are to be found pronounced landlady potentialities. I recall a landlady I had on Montague Street, Brooklyn Heights, whose passion for cleaning amounted to a mania. This young person's housewifery frenzy always put me in mind of another soul who could not rest--Hokusai, who at about a hundred and ten was spoken of as "the old man mad about painting." Hovering about, tortured by a desire to begin, when I left for my breakfast, she was still at it upon my return from my morning stroll, my door barricaded by articles of dismembered furniture; still at it when I came back a bit impatiently from a second walk; still at it while I read the paper in her dining-room. And so without surcease throughout the march of days and seasons. She unscrewed the knobs of the bed to polish the threads thereof; she removed penpoints from penholders and made them to shine like burnished gold. I had another landlady moved by the same springs of feeling, on Spruce Street, Philadelphia. Later, I heard, her husband died, and she espoused her latent career.