“Did the judges in the case you just referred to say anything about the open door case?” questioned the earnest inquirer after knowledge.
“Yes, and held that the whole tenor of the judgment in it was that a boarding-house keeper is not bound to take such reasonable degree of care of the goods of his guest as a prudent man may reasonably be expected to take of his own.”
“It seems strange,” urged the youth—by the way, a careless, heedless young fellow was he—“that such people should in no way be liable to look after the property of their boarders.”
“I did not say exactly that. They are of course liable where a loss of a lodger’s goods has resulted from gross negligence on their part, or they themselves have been guilty of some misdeed.”[392]
“Those two cases, I think,” said one who had been a silent listener hitherto, “were both decided in England; but what say our American judges on the point?”
“So far as they have spoken,” I replied, “they have, as a rule, corroborated and agreed with the sentiments of their ermined and bewigged fellows across the ocean. The Supreme Court of Tennessee decided that an innkeeper was not liable for the clothing of a boarder stolen from his room, without the former’s fault, although he would be for that of a guest;[393] and the judge gave as his reason for making the distinction that a passenger or wayfaring man may be an entire stranger in the place, and must put up and lodge at the inn to which his day’s journey may bring him, and so it is important that he should be protected by the most stringent rules of law enforcing the liability of hotel-keepers; but as a boarder does not need such protection the law does not afford it, and it is sufficient to give him a remedy when he proves the innkeeper guilty of culpable neglect. And in Kentucky, where a regular boarder at an hotel deposited gold with the proprietor, who put it in his safe, into which thieves broke and stole, the court held that the hotel-keeper was not liable as an innkeeper, but only as a depositary without reward, and as no gross negligence was shown the poor boarder failed in his attempt to recover his lost cash in that way.[394] I had better tell you, however, that in New York it has very recently been held that a boarding-house keeper is liable for the loss of a boarder’s property by theft, committed by a stranger allowed to enter the boarder’s room by a servant of the house,[395] and that it is his duty to exercise such care over a boarder’s goods as a prudent man would over his own.”
“Well, will you please tell me what is the difference between a boarding-house and an inn?” asked one of the other boarders.
“It would afford me great pleasure to answer your question at another time, but at the present I am sorry to say that duty calls me and I must go.”
Leaving my listeners to digest the law lecture I had delivered to them, I repaired to the best parlor, and there found Mrs. Lawyer and another lady in a state of white heat over the performances of a boarder who occupied the next room—one of the genus referred to by Coleridge when he said,
“Swans sing before they die; ’twere no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing”—