My greataunt, a prim Victorian lady from upstate New York, taught me a song in the late 1940s that she remembered from her youth:

I know a boarding house, far, far away.
Where they serve ham and eggs three times a day.
Oh how the boarders yell when they hear that dinner bell
Oh what an awful smell three times a day.

It would appear to have been a popular folk song with many variants over 100 years ago when boarding houses were omnipresent.