“About three thousand,” was the response; “and four hundred table-cloths, if people are reasonably careful.”
“I would like some things washed; how soon could you do them?” asked my wife.
“If they are large articles, you can have them back in your room in fifteen minutes; if small, in seven minutes.”
“That’s rather quick,” I remarked.
“Well, sir, I have known a man to have his shirt washed while taking a bath; and a handkerchief, sent down the tube dirty, was returned clean during the time he was arranging his neck-tie, or parting his back hair.”
On we went, to the pantries, and saw the thousands and tens of thousands of pieces of china and crockery, glass and cutlery.
“A breakage occasionally would not matter much, among so many thousands of pieces,” I remarked.
“It would matter more to the man who broke the article than to the hotel proprietor, I calculate,” responded the man in charge of this legion of crockery and glassware.
“Well, sir, that depends on how the breakage occurred. I take it that a guest at an hotel is, with respect to the things that he uses, in the same position as if he hired them—in fact he does hire them; and it is well settled that every hirer of a chattel is bound to use the thing let to him in a proper and reasonable manner, to take the same care of it that a prudent and cautious man ordinarily takes of his own property, and to return it to the owner at the proper time, in as good condition as it was in when he got it, subject only to deterioration produced by ordinary wear and tear, and reasonable use, and injuries caused by accidents which have happened without any default or neglect on the part of the hirer.[261] The owner must stand to all the ordinary risks to which the chattel is naturally liable, but not to the risks occasioned by negligence or want of ordinary care on the part of the hirer.[262] In fact, as a late writer has very well put it, the hirer of a chattel is in no sense an insurer, nor is he liable for culpa levissima, or that apocryphal phrase of infinitesimal negligence which stands in antithesis to the diligentia diligentissima which the law does not, as a continuous service, exact.”[263]
As I paused, the man hastily remarked that he had no time to stop and talk, and my wife, fearing that the subterranean air was affecting my brain, said that we had better go up stairs; so, like the youth with the strange device, “Excelsior” was our motto.