“Not even a hobby-horse.[216] Brushes and razors, pens and ink, are baggage,[217] and perchance a present.[218] So are the manuscripts of a student;[219] but not the pencil sketches of an artist;[220] on this latter point, however, the doctors of the law disagree.[221] According to one judge, a concertina, a flute, or a fiddle might pass muster; but his fellows, however much music they had in themselves, determined not to be moved with concord of sweet sounds, so they out-voted their musical confrere.[222] Shakespeare saith, ‘Let no such man be trusted;’ so, perchance, we must conclude that these judges were astray in their law. In Pennsylvania, a journeyman carpenter may take his tools as baggage,[223] though in Ontario he cannot,[224] any more than a blacksmith can carry his forge, or a farmer his plow. Nor can a merchant take his wares,[225] nor a commercial his samples,[226] nor a banker his money,[227] nor a lawyer his papers,[228] though an M. D. may take his surgical instruments;[229] nor may a seamstress carry her sewing machine,[230] nor—Hark!
“What strain is this that comes into the room,
At midnight, as if yonder gleaming light,
Which seems to wander like the moon,
Were seraph-freighted? Now it dies away
In a most far-off tremble, and is still;
Leaving a charmed silence.
Hark! one more dip of fingers in the wires!
One scarce-heard murmur struggling into sound,
And fading like a sunbeam from the ground,
Or gilded vanes of dimly visioned spires!”
Here a fantasia on her nasal organ (which my wife always carried with her, despite the decisions of anti-musical judges) vibrating unmistakably through the chamber, dispelled the idea of heavenly visitants, and informed me that my spouse had journeyed off to that land of Nod, from whose bourn no baggage returns. Snoring, like yawning, is infectious—sometimes; and this was one of the times.
* * * * * *
“’Tis sweet to see the day dawn creeping gradual thro’ the sky,” and feel that there is for one yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep; but even in the most fashionable hotel the hour will at length come when one must shake off dull sloth and burst the bonds of sleep, which at night are but as spider’s webs, but in the morning have become even fetters of brass; and that miserable hour came in time to me.
When I went down stairs to examine the register to see who had arrived during the night, I found some excitement existing around the office. On inquiry, (and who except a German savant ever beheld a row, small or great, without seeking to know the wherefore thereof,) I learned that a gent had the day before given the clerk a pocket-book to keep, and that it had been stolen out of the desk; the owner was demanding restitution, dollar for dollar and cent for cent, if not eye for eye and tooth for tooth. The landlord said that the man had been negligent in not telling the clerk there was money in the book.
“No, I wasn’t,” was the reply, “there was only $136 in it; and what but money would you expect to be in a pocket-book—a tooth-pick?—a cigar? I know that in Iowa an innkeeper had to cash up in a similar case,[231] and I’ll make you do it if there is law or justice in this part of the American eagle’s eyry.”
“In Kentucky,” said a by-stander, who seemed to hail from that State, “an hotel-keeper was held liable for the loss by robbery of pocket money retained by a guest in his own possession.”[232]
“And in Maryland,” said another Southerner, “it has been decided that a traveler need not deposit in the office safe any money reasonably necessary for his expenses that he may have with him.”[233]
“Yes,” I said, “there are other cases, also, which appear to establish the point that a sojourner at an hotel may keep in his pocket or in his room money enough to pay his daily way, and that if his purse be surreptitiously disposed of, the landlord must make good his loss;[234] yet still there is a very late New York decision, where my friend Hyatt found to his cost, that where a landlord provides a safe, and puts up the usual notices about it, and the visitor chooses not to place his money in it, the proprietor of the establishment is not responsible for the loss of any of the cash, not even for what would be required for the guest’s ordinary traveling expenses.”[235]