“Nothing more would have been wanted.”
“Could they have taken our clothes? I thought all such things were exempt.”
“Generally speaking, they are from seizure for debt; but not from distress for rent, unless they are in actual use at the time. In 1796 Mr. Baynes, who had furnished lodgings at half a guinea a week, was two months in arrear, and a bailiff appeared upon the scene and took his wearing apparel and that of Mrs. B., although part of it was actually in the wash-tub at the time; and Lord Kenyon said it was all right.[417] The same judge decided in another case that a landlord could legally take the clothes belonging to a man’s wife and children, while they—the ‘clothes screens,’ as Carlyle calls them—not the clothes—were in bed, although the bipeds intended to put them on in the morning, and had been daily in the habit of wearing them, on the ground that they were not in actual use.[418] But Kenyon, my dear, sometimes said absurd things. For instance, once, when indignant at the delay of an attorney, he exclaimed, wrathfully, ‘This is the last hair in the tail of procrastination.’”
“The law seems very hard. Why, that poor woman would have to stay in bed. But talking of tails, could they have taken my cat—my beautiful pussy?” said Mrs. Lawyer, looking over where
The cat’s dark silhouette on the wall,
A couchant tiger’s seemed to fall.
“Well—ah—in Coke upon Littleton it is said, no; but the reason given is that cats are things in which no man can have an absolute and valuable property; and that reason might not be applicable to the case of a costly Angora like yours, and you know, cessante ratione cessat et ipsa lex; but your bird might have been taken.”[419]
“It seems strange that the landlord can take the property of other people to pay his tenant’s debts.”
“It does; and in many parts of this country only the goods of the debtor can be taken,[420] and the judges are generally inclined to deliver the lodger from the claws of the landlord; and so it has been held that while the goods of an assignee of the tenant are liable, those of a mere under-tenant are not;[421] and in England, of late years, an act has been passed for the protection of the lodger’s goods from the claims of the landlord for rent due him by his immediate tenant.”[422]
“But if our things had been taken to pay the rent, could we not have made the other boarders contribute their share?”
“No, I am afraid not,”[423] I answered.