THE WILLOWS HOTEL.
Menu. Dinner.
Soup.
Purée of Split Pea.
Fish.
Baked Salmon (Spanish).
Boiled Cod. Lobster Sauce.
Entrées.
Beef Hot Pot.
Pig's Head à la Printanière.
Macaroni au Gratin.
Boiled.
Boiled Ox Tongue. Kipper Sauce.
Boiled Ham.
Roast.
Roast Beef. Horse-radish.
Roast Pork. Apple Sauce.
Roast Mutton. Jelly.
Salad.
Sliced Beets.
Fish Salad.
Vegetables.
Boiled Mashed Potatoes.
Green Peas.
Dessert.
Snow Pudding. Peach Pie.
Apple Pie. Stewed Rhubarb.
The drawback to the hotel was the logging camp in the neighbourhood.
The bar of the hotel was about fifty yards from the hotel itself, in a separate building, and on Saturday night many of the loggers came dropping in to waste the earnings of the week. Drunkenness on these occasions was far too common, and till the small hours of the morning the sound of revelry from the bar was not conducive to a good night's rest.
Some of the characters who frequented the bar were weird in the extreme, and when fairly "full"—as the local expression was—the hotel was not inviolate to them. One who particularly interested me might have been taken out of one of Fenimore Cooper's novels. My acquaintance with him was made on the hotel verandah. With a friendly feeling born of much whisky, he placed his arm on my shoulder, and assured me that although if he had his rights he would be a Lord, he did not disdain the acquaintanceship of a commoner like myself; in fact, that he had seldom seen a man to whom he had taken such a fancy, or with whom he would more willingly tramp the woods, if I would only give him the pleasure of my company in his trapper's hut some few miles inland. His suggestion that our friendship should be cemented by an adjournment to the bar did not meet with the ready acceptance he expected, which evidently disappointed him, for he could not grasp the fact that any one living could refuse a drink.
Poor "Lord B.," as he was called, was only his own enemy. As I always addressed him "My Lord," which he took quite seriously, we became quite pals.
A trapper and prospector by profession, he had a fair education, and when sober was a shrewd man of the local world, which confined itself to prospecting for minerals and cruising timber claims.
Persistently drunk for two or three days at a time, he would suddenly sober down, put a pack on his back which few men could carry, and disappear into the woods to his lonely log cabin, only to return in a few days ready for a fresh spree. At least, this was his life while I stayed at the hotel, for in one month he appeared three times.
No doubt during the winter, when occupied with his traps, he could neither afford the time nor the money for an hotel visit.
He was wizened in appearance and lightly built, but as hard as nails. Dishevelled to look at when on the spree, as soon as it was all over he became a different character, appearing in neat, clean clothes, and full of reminiscences of backwoods life. He was always a subject of interest to me, and, poor fellow, like many others on the west coast, only his own enemy.