A BOARDING-HOUSE WONDER

Marlborough Express, Volume XLVII, Issue 140, 16 June 1913, Page 7

A BOARDING-HOUSE WONDER

The model boarding-house keeper, who conducts her establishment move for philanthropy than for profit, provides for her lodgers' smallest wants, and so endears I herself to their hearts that they cannot i tear themselves away from her house, is a ' women deserving oi: notice. Her name is j Miss Margaret Murray ; she lives -in I America and she is eighty years old. j For fifty years Miss Murray has kept a boarding-house at Chicago, and her boarders have stayed with her for fifteen, twenty, thirty years, and more. Her record was an official of the Chicago and North Western Kailway, who boarded with her for forty-five years. At a farewell banquet tendered her by her I admirincr lodgers on the occasion of her i retirement recently, she was toasted as "the paragon of boarding-house keepers," and* "the most wonderful boarding-house in the, world." The?e men, many of whom have boarded with Miss Murray for the greater part of their lives, and are now turned adrift upon a friendless world, declare that they face their future with a positive despair. Some of them even refused to marry because they preferred Miss Murray's benevolent and motherly care to what they considered the more uncertain charms of domestic life. Others who married returned when they became widowers. The secret of this.almost uncanny spell which Miss Murray succeeded in weaving about her lodgers is explained by her, aphoristically as follows :—" Don't run too much to style. Cater to individual appetites. Do your .own cooking. Mother jour men. Darn their socks and sew their buttons on. Make your boarders your boys. Listen to their troubles. Never try to mix men and women ; as boarders they won't nix." Miss Murray made a point of pleasing one and all. Each boarder had his steak cooked as he liked it, under-do*e, or well-done, with or without gravy, melted butter, and the like. As for charging, she did it with reluctance, and extras- were never mentioned in the bill. To this her boarders testify. Beggars and stray cats and dogs never went away hungry from her door. One beggar came regularly once a week for twenty years for a free meal of ham, and got it. The boarders protested, but she persisted. How she made ends meet, no one knows, but she did. "She is the most wonderful woman that ever lived, is the enthusiastic remark of a boarder of thirty-four years' standing, a tribute not often paid by a boarder to his land lady. And the other boarders are not a whit less eulogistic.