If this were all; but this is not. Mrs.----, who writes to all her friends boastingly of the cheap summer quarters that she has found, and who gains by the village shop-keeper's scales a pound of flesh a week, habitually finds fault with the food, with the mattresses, with the chairs, with the rag-carpets, with every thing, in short, down to the dust and the flies, for neither of which last the poor landlord could be legitimately held responsible. This is not an exaggerated picture. Everybody who has boarded in country places in the summer has known dozens of such women. Every country landlord can produce dozens of such letters, and of letters still more exacting and unreasonable.
The average city man or woman who goes to a country house to board, goes expecting what it is in the nature of things impossible that they should have. The man expects to have boots blacked and hot water ready, and a bell to ring for both. What experienced country boarder has not laughed in his sleeve to see such an one, newly arrived, putting his head out snappingly, like a turtle, from his doorway, and calling to chance passers, "How d'ye get at anybody in this house?"
If it is a woman, she expects that the tea will be of the finest flavor, and never boiled; that steaks will be porter-house steaks; that green peas will be in plenty; and that the American girl, who is chambermaid for the summer, and school-teacher in the winter, and who, ten to one, could put her to the blush in five minutes by superior knowledge on many subjects, will enter and leave her room and wait upon her at the table with the silent respectfulness of a trained city servant.
This is all very silly. But it happens. At the end of every summer hundreds of disappointed city people go back to their homes grumbling about country food and country ways. Hundreds of tired and discouraged wives of country landlords sit down in their houses, at last emptied, and vow a vow that never again will they take "city folks to board." But the great law of supply and demand is too strong for them. The city must come out of itself for a few weeks, and get oxygen for its lungs, sunlight for its eyes, and rest for its overworked brain. The country must open its arms, whether it will or not, and share its blessings. And so the summers and the summerings go on, and there are always to be heard in the land the voices of murmuring boarders, and of landlords deprecating, vindicating. We confess that our sympathies are with the landlords. The average country landlord is an honest, well-meaning man, whose idea of the profit to be made "off boarders" is so moderate and simple that the keepers of city boarding-houses would laugh it and him to scorn. If this were not so, would he be found undertaking to lodge and feed people for one dollar or a dollar and a half a day? Neither does he dream of asking them, even at this low price, to fare as he fares. The "Excelsior" mattresses, at which they cry out in disgust, are beds of down in comparison with the straw "tick" on which he and his wife sleep soundly and contentedly. He has paid $4.50 for each mattress, as a special concession to what he understands city prejudice to require. The cheap painted chamber-sets are holiday adorning by the side of the cherry and pine in the bedrooms of his family. He buys fresh meat every day for dinner; and nobody can understand the importance of this fact who is not familiar with the habit of salt-pork and codfish in our rural districts. That the meat is tough, pale, stringy is not his fault; no other is to be bought. Stetson, himself, if he dealt with this country butcher, could do no better. Vegetables? Yes, he has planted them. If we look out of our windows, we can see them on their winding way. They will be ripe by and by. He never tasted peas in his life before the Fourth of July, or cucumbers before the middle of August. He hears that there are such things; but he thinks they must be "dreadful unhealthy, them things forced out of season,"--and, whether healthy or not, he can't get them. We couldn't ourselves, if we were keeping house in the same township. To be sure, we might send to the cities for them, and be served with such as were wilted to begin with, and would arrive utterly unfit to be eaten at end of their day's journey, costing double their market price in the added express charge. We should not do any such thing. We should do just as he does, make the best of "plum sauce," or even dried apples. We should not make our sauce with molasses, probably; but he does not know that sugar is better; he honestly likes molasses best. As for saleratus in the bread, as for fried meat, and fried doughnuts, and ubiquitous pickles,--all those things have he, and his fathers before him, eaten, and, he thinks, thriven on from time immemorial. He will listen incredulously to all we say about the effects of alkalies, the change of fats to injurious oils by frying, the indigestibility of pickles, &c.; for, after all, the unanswerable fact remains on his side, though he may be too polite or too slow to make use of it in the argument, that, having fed on these poisons all his life, he can easily thrash us to-day, and his wife and daughters can and do work from morning till night, while ours must lie down and rest by noon. In spite of all this, he will do what he can to humor our whims. Never yet have we seen the country boarding-house where kindly and persistent remonstrance would not introduce the gridiron and banish the frying-pan, and obtain at least an attempt at yeast-bread. Good, patient, long-suffering country people! The only wonder to us is that they tolerate so pleasantly, make such effort to gratify, the preferences and prejudices of city men and women, who come and who remain strangers among them; and who, in so many instances, behave from first to last as if they were of a different race, and knew nothing of any common bonds of humanity and Christianity.
The Good Staff of Pleasure.
In an inn in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, where I dined every day for three weeks, one summer, I made the acquaintance of a little maid called Gretchen. She stood all day long washing dishes, in a dark passageway which communicated in some mysterious fashion with cellar, kitchen, dining-room, and main hall of the inn. From one or other of these quarters Gretchen was sharply called so often that it was a puzzle to know how she contrived to wash so much as a cup or a plate in the course of the day. Poor child! I am afraid she did most of her work after dark; for I sometimes left her standing there at ten o'clock at night. She was blanched and shrunken from fatigue and lack of sunlight. I doubt if ever, unless perhaps on some exceptional Sunday, she knew the sensation of a full breath of pure air or a warm sunbeam on her face.
But whenever I passed her she smiled, and there was never-failing good-cheer in her voice when she said "Good-morning." Her uniform atmosphere of contentedness so impressed and surprised me that, at last, I said to Franz, the head waiter,--
"What makes Gretchen so happy? She has a hard life, always standing in that narrow dark place, washing dishes."
Franz was phlegmatic, and spoke very little English. He shrugged his shoulders, in sign of assent that Gretchen's life was a hard one, and added,--
"Ja, ja. She likes because all must come at her door. There will be no one which will say not nothing if they go by."