“‘M-Mrs. C-Coates is a f-funny old watch. She b-broke her chain a g-good while ago, and has been r-running down ever since; she must have a mainspring a mile long.’ This is apropos of our friend here when he gets started on a legal point.”
“And he is always starting some such shoppy subject; like Adelaide Proctor’s young man—
‘He cracks no egg without a legal sigh,
Nor eats of beef but thinking on the law,’”
was the response wafted into the recesses of my auricular appendages—so chilling it was that I incontinently sneezed thrice.
“There seems,” said the student, “to have been a decided diversity of opinion among the learned judges in that case.”
“Yes, indeed,” I replied. “But the point has been made clear in a more recent case, in which all the judges took the same view of the extent of the liability.”[391]
“What was that decision, sir?”
“That the law imposes no obligation on a lodging-house keeper to take care of the goods of his boarder. A lodger who was just about to change his quarters, was out of his room, and the landlord allowed a stranger to enter to look at it; the latter carried off some of the boarder’s property, and when the owner sued the landlord the court gave him to understand that he must himself bear the loss. Earle, C. J., said that the judges had decided that even if the things had been stolen by a member of the household the proprietor would not be liable. He went on to remark that he was most particularly averse to affirming, for the first time, that a lodging-house keeper has the duty cast upon him of taking care of his guest’s goods; he saw great difficulties in so holding, and thought it would be casting upon him an undefined responsibility which would be most inconvenient; considering that lodgers consist of all classes—from the highest to the lowest—one could hardly exaggerate the mischief that would ensue from holding the proprietor liable. It would be impossible, his lordship continued, to lay down any definite test of liability; each case must be left to the discretion or caprice of a jury; the liability of the keeper of the house must vary according to the situation of the premises and a variety of circumstances too numerous to mention. If, on the other hand, the law is that the lodger must take care of his own goods, it only imposes upon him the same care which he is bound to take when he walks the streets; he may always secure his valuables by carrying them about with him, or by placing them specially in the custody of the keeper of the house.”
“But it appears rather hard to compel a man to carry his goods about with him wherever he goes, or else hand them over to the boarding-house keeper who might be down in the kitchen cooking dinner or washing cups and saucers; besides, she or he might refuse to take care of them,” captiously remarked one of the company.
“Notwithstanding all that, I have told you the law correctly, and Byles, J., remarked once that a contrary decision would cast upon the proprietor ‘a frightful amount of liability,’” I replied.