University of Virginia Library

THE
EXTRA LODGER.

1. CHAPTER I.

Among the numberless tyrants, in and out
of office, who rule the sovereign American
people with rods of iron, none can compare
—whether it respects the despotic rigour of
their rule, or the patient submissiveness of their
subjects—with their High Mightinesses, the
innkeepers. Steamboat captains, and stage-proprietors
may, in their vanity, contest with
them the claim to superiority in power; and,
indeed, the undoubted privileges both these
classes possess to maim and kill their customers
at will, would seem to put them at the
head of the powerful; but no honest, disinterested
man who will consider all the circumstances,
the power of the lordly Boniface
over the comfort of his lodgers, and the uniform
despotism of his rule, can hesitate to
award the palm to their rivals. In other

lands, circumstances have degraded the lords
of the spigot into a condition of subservience
and vassalage to society; and they are insultingly
regarded, and, incredible as it may appear,
they even regard themselves as the servants
of the public. Here, in this happy republic,
where all are free but the people, they
have assumed their proper attitude, as masters
of their patrons, whom they rule with
autocratic severity grievous to behold and
lamentable to suffer. High and low, the
princes of metropolitan hotels and the kings
of the log-cabin tavern on the wayside, they
know their power, and exercise it. The metropolitan
potentates, indeed, sometimes affect
a certain citizen-kinglike humility, and govern
with decency and suavity; while it may
be observed of the others, their compeers,
that the lower you descend in rank among
them, the more savage and irrespective becomes
their tyranny. Thus, with the lord of
your town inn, you may sometimes venture
upon a little complaint of the cook and chamber-maid,
without fear of being knocked
down for impertinence; and, sometimes, in a
village hotel, you may prefer a little expostulation
on the subject of horse-meat and clean
sheets, without the absolute certainty of being
turned into the streets. But even here we
must not expect always to find our dignitaries
in a good humour. The possession of
power is a constant provocative to the exercise
of it; and we know not when the monarch
may put on his robes of state, and shake
his sceptre of authority. It is but a little
while, as every body knows, since a royal
prince, with his whole cortége at his heels,
was turned out of doors, or at least refused
admission, by two different inkeepers, sceptre
in hand. It is true, that, in both these instances,
the royal personage was entirely unknown,
being mistaken, in the one case, for
an opera fiddler, in the other for something
equally insignificant; otherwise mine hosts
had been happy to kiss the dust from his
royal shoes, out of a mere republican respect
for greatness.

The king of the cabin—your true country
tavern-keeper—is quite another sort of person,
with whom to complain, to exhibit any
symptoms of rebellious discontent, is to awake
the sleeping lion. What cares he for your
fine coat, your long dangling watch-chain,
your gentlemanly swagger, your titles of distinction—your
Colonel or General, your Doctor,
your Reverend, your Honourable? You

are, sir, his customer—a suitor for meat and
drink, which he graciously vouchsafes you,
taking no consideration therefor, except a
certain number of ninepences, or half-dollars,
together with a due addition of reverence
naturally belonging to the master of the house
that shelters you. His house, though every
chamber be reeking with mud and rain, is his
house, and if you don't like it, you may leave
it; his beds, though forty human souls, with
boots on, may have nestled betwixt the unchanged
sheets, doing battle all night with
Incubus and Succuba, in the shape of those
strange bedfellows with which misery makes
us acquainted, have harboured your betters,
and why therefore should you presume to
grumble? His table, plentifully or sparely covered
as the case may be, with uncatable eatables—coffee
made, or seeming to be made,
of burnt blankets, sodden bread, stale bacon
and palpitating chickens, greasy potatoes and
withered turnip-tops—is the table that contents
him, and if you don't like it you may
go—to a place entirely unmentionable!

Truly, your republican innkeeper is the most
mighty of tyrants. You may find him, sometimes,
a very amiable personage, as great
men sometimes will be; but take heed you

trifle not with his amiableness; for, verily, he
is not a person to be trifled with by any rabblement
traveller, for whom he does not care
the snap of his independent fingers—no,
not he.

In truth, the common country tavern-keepers—those
especially in new regions, or at
a distance from the great towns—are, for the
most part, mere farmers, who have been
driven by sheer necessity (not poverty) to
open their houses to the public. In very few
parts of the land is the country densely
enough settled, and the travelling sufficiently
great, to support lines of taverns along the
roads at convenient distances. The farmer
must hang out the bush and play the landlord,
or be eaten up by his hospitality. He
knows nothing of cooking or housekeeping
beyond what he has been accustomed to in
his own family, and he cares nothing about
learning; in half the instances, he would prefer
the traveller's room to his company: it is
not therefore surprising his hotel should not
be the best in the world, nor himself the most
obliging of landlords.

With this condition of things prevailing, it
is evident one must not look for any exemplifications
of the charming rural hostelries,

the little hawthorn-crowned alehouse, so long
embalmed in the pages of English poets and
novelists, with its proper familiars, the facetious
host, his buxom wife, and trim daughter,
all obsequious, bustling, eager to make
themselves, and their house, and every thing
in it, agreeable to your honour. You cannot
here say, with any propriety, you will take
your ease in your inn, that being the privilege
solely of its master; nor can you have
any greater expectation of comfort, which is
an article seldom put down in the bill of fare.
In brief, one should expect nothing; and to
the inexperienced traveller I recommend the
maxim which observation has shown me to
be productive of the best effects in mollifying
evils, as well as preventing a hundred inconveniences
that might otherwise occur:—Be
submissive; graciously receive, thankfully
suffer, pay your money, and depart in peace.

It was once my fate to pass a night in a
certain wayside caravansary, among the
mountains of Virginia, a lowly and logly
habitation, from whose mean appearance no
one would have inferred the majestic spirit
of the ruler within; up—or rather down to
which—for it stood at the bottom of a hill—
one fine evening in September, rolled a mail-coach,

well crammed with passengers, of
whom I, for my sins, was one. We numbered
twelve souls in all, nine inside, and three
out; of which latter group, I, being somewhat
a valetudinarian, was honoured with a seat
beside his highness of the whip; while my two
companions, the one a Mississippian, the
other a varmint, as he called himself, of Tennessee,
sat gallantly upon the top, where
they rolled and pitched about, as we thundered
down the rocky road, in a manner admirable
to behold—or, as the Mississippian
expressed it, “like two short tailed dogs in
a boiling pot”—a resemblance that was
somewhat the stronger for the tremendous
bow-woughs and yelpings, with which he—
sometimes assisted by the Tennessean—beguiled
the weariness of the way.

Certainly, there never was a jollier set of
rantipole personages got together in a mail-stage
before. Besides the Mississippian yelping
on the top, there was another of the same
tribe on the inside, who could imitate the
braying of an ass to perfection—a melody
which he kept up in rivalry with his friend
and partner aloft. Add to these an Alabamian
who sang negro songs; a Rock River
Illinois, who whooped like an Indian; a Texian

that played the mestang, or wild horse of
the prairies, and, besides kicking the bottom
nearly from the stage, neighed and whinneyed
till the very team-horses on the road responded
to the note; and five others who did
nothing but scream and laugh to fill up the
concert; and you have before you a set of the
happiest madbrained roisterers that ever astonished
the monarch of a stage house.

At this place we were destined to sup and
lodge; and accordingly, in due course of time,
we were all seated at the board, where we
had the satisfaction of being tyrannized over
both by mine host and mine hostess, the one
glum yet facetious, the other ugly as ill-temper,
and haughty as a princess. There was
nothing at all remarkable in the supper, which
was no better nor worse than usual, except
the total absence of that sine qua non of a
Virginia table, fried chickens—and, indeed,
of chickens in every shape, there not being
so much as a wing or claw on the table.
This omission producing a gentle interrogatory,
somewhat in the tone of expostulation,
from one of the Mississippians, (who, as well
as all the other travellers, it is proper to say,
was now playing the part of a very modest
well behaved young gentleman,) mine host

very wittily gave us to understand, “it was
all our own fault, seeing that the diabolical
noise we had made, while approaching the
house, had scared all his fowls into the mountains.”
This, the Mississipppian declared,
“reminded him of Captain Dobbs's chickens in
Kentucky, which, he had the Captain's own
words for it, no sooner caught sight of a
traveller approaching, than they immediately
took to their heels; being well aware, from
long experience, as Captain Dobbs said, that
the visit of a stranger was certain death to
them.”

Before we had finished supper, a thirteenth
guest made his appearance—a tall rawboned
Yankee pedler, it seemed, who drove up in
his little wagon through a shower that had
begun to fall, and presently entered the supper-room,
bearing a pair of saddle-bags which
he laid beside him with great care, as if afraid
its contents should be injured, if placed out
of his protection. He had a very meek, solemn,
unpresuming, solitary look, and rather
sneaked into than took a chair at the foot of
the table; where he waited very submisively
for the cup of coffee, which my landlady
deigned, after sundry contemptuous looks,
and five minutes of delay, to send him. On

the whole, he did not seem to produce any
more favourable impression upon my fellow
travellers, who left him to consume his chickenless
supper by himself, while they proceeded
to the bar-room to resolve a doubt which
had entered the head of the Mississippian,
Captain's Dobbs's friend—to wit, whether the
thunder of their approach had not killed all
the mint-plants, and so deprived them of their
juleps. This was fortunately proved not to
be the case: the young gentlemen concocted
their sleeping draughts, smoked their segars,
settled the affairs of the nation, and then,
having received a hint that such was the will
and pleasure of the landlord, ascended to the
traveller's room to seek their beds.

2. CHAPTER II.

This traveller's room was the garret, or
the half thereof, the other moiety being partitioned
off, and applied to some other purpose;
and as it was neither ceiled nor plastered,
it presented no very striking look of
luxury or comfort. But it exhibited the rare
and captivating spectacle of a dozen different
beds, in which each man was to possess, for
one night at least, the happiness of sleeping
without a bedfellow. The beds were, moreover,
all single ones, one only excepted, which
was neither single nor double, and, indeed,
was a mere plank stretched between two
stools, with a feather-bed hung over it, pannier-wise;
and so far, it appeared to us, that
our landlord, even in his out-of-the-world
nook, must have been visited with some inklings
of civilization; but upon further consideration,

it was agreed, we owed the size, as
well as the number of the couches, to the necessity
of the case, the garret being of such
a figure as to stow a dozen truckle-beds
much more commodiously than half that
number of double ones.

Nevertheless, we were all well pleased
with the arrangement; nor did any difficulty
present itself, until the braying gentleman,
regaling us first with a moderate burst of his
music, by way of calling attention, demanded
“Who the nation was to sleep with the
Yankee?” a question that no one answered,
until he had first popped into, and so secured
possession of, his cot; after which,
each swore, with an oath as terrible as was
ever sworn in Flanders, the Yankee should
not sleep with him. Upon this point the determination
was quite unanimous. I might,
indeed, except myself, having made no rash
vow on the occasion; which was the more
unnecessary as I had, partly by accident, and
partly from choice, fallen heir to the narrow
bed of plank, spoken of before, in which there
was no fear of my being troubled with a bedfellow.

We had scarce arranged this important
matter, when the supernumerary guest and

extra lodger, who had perhaps been detained
securing his property for the night, came up
stairs, bearing his saddle-bags and a candle,
and with hesitating step and modest countenance,
stole through the room, looking for
an empty bed, but of course without finding
any.

“Perhaps, gentlemen,” said he, with an extremely
solemn, wo-begone voice, of inquiry,
“some of you can tell me where I am to
sleep to-night?”

“In paradise, I suppose,” said the braying
gentleman; “for I'll be hanged if there's any
room for you here. You see, the beds are
all full.”

“I do,” quoth the stranger, looking disconsolately
round, “and they are shocking
narrow ones, too. But I rather calculate, the
landlord meant me to have half a one, some
where or other among you?”

“Well, that seems but reasonable,” said
the Mississippian; “and I should be very willing
to let you have half of mine; only—”
here he turned over the bed clothes and displayed
a huge bowie-knife lying on one side
of him, and a pistol on the other—“only that
I never sleep without my arms, and they are
somewhat dangerous when I dream at night,

as I always do after a bad supper.—'Pon my
soul, sir, I always dream the niggers are murdering
me, and so fall to at 'em in a way that's
quite a caution! 'Pon my soul, sir, if you
had seen me, how I slashed the bed to pieces
last night, and shot off the bed-post! Had
to pay ten dollars damages to old Skinflint,
the landlord!”

The Yankee recoiled with trepidation from
this perilous bedfellow, and preferred his request
to the Tennessean, representing very
piteously, that he had an “affection of the
head”—though of what kind he did not inform
us—which was always aggravated by want
of, or even by uncomfortable, sleep. The Tennessean,
however, swore he was just as
bad as his neighbour, the Mississippian,
though in another way; he never could sleep
with any body, without beginning to fight, the
moment he fell asleep; and it was but a fortnight
ago, he said, that he had gouged an unlucky
bedfellow's eyes out.

The Alabamian declared he chewed tobacco
in his sleep, and that his quids were to the
full as dangerous to a bedmate's eyes as the
Tennessean's fingers. The second Mississippian
had taken a position directly across the
bed, his head sticking out on one side, his

legs on the other, in which position only, he
swore, he could sleep with any comfort; and
therefore desired the Yankee to apply to some
one else; which he did, though with no better
fortune, some excusing themselves on pretences
as ridiculous as those I have mentioned,
while one or two others, whose wit was
not so ready, met his supplicating glances
and hesitating applications with downright
refusals. As for myself, the narrowness of
my couch was so manifest, as to secure me
from application.

The poor Yankee, thus rejected on all
sides, and with the prospect of remaining
bedless for the night, took the desperate resolution
of preferring a complaint to his majesty
the innkeeper. For this purpose, he
opened the door, and called twice or thrice,
but with timid tones, to mine host; who,
having already retired to his bed, and not
choosing to be troubled, took no notice of
the first calls, and only replied to the last by
threatening to turn his unfortunate customer
out of the house, if he did not keep quiet.

To be turned out of a house in which he
was so inhospitably treated, might have seemed
no very disagreeable alternative; but, unluckily,
a dismal rain had now commenced,

falling, and there was no other place of refuge
within eight or ten miles.

Nothing remained for the extra lodger but
to stretch himself upon the floor; which he at
last did, but with sundry groans and complaints,
pillowing his head upon his saddle
bags; in which position he lay until his fellow-travellers,
myself with the rest, had all
dropt sound asleep.

We had not slept, I imagine, more than a
quarter of an hour, when we were all, at the
same moment, roused up by a terrible voice
crying, in the midst of the room, “If there's
no other way with them, cut their aristocratical
throats!”

The words and voice were alike alarming;
but judge our astonishment when, starting
from our beds, we beheld the Yankee, rising
half naked from the floor, as grim and gaunt
as Don Quixotte himself, holding a bowie-knife,
to which the Mississippian's was as a
penknife to a razor, and brandishing it with
looks of blood and fury. “By snakes and
niggers!” cried the braying gentleman, with
something like alarm, “he dreams harder than
I do!”

“Wake him up, he'll do a mischief,” exclaimed
others; for we all thought the poor

fellow was suffering under some frightful
dream.

The Tennessean, bolder than the rest,
seized him by the arm; upon which he dropped
his knife, and, his countenance changing
from rage to trepidation, immediately exclaimed,—“I
give myself up; I am your prisoner.
But take notice, gentlemen, and bear
witness for me, I yield to superior force—Give
me five minutes to say my prayers!”

“Death and thunder!” cried the Varmint
of Tennessee, starting back, “the man is
mad!”

And so, indeed, it seemed to us all.

“Give me five minutes to say my prayers,”
quoth the Yankee; who, however, instead of
dropping upon his knees to pray, burst into
tears, and harangued us in somewhat the following
words: “I am an honest man and
patriot, a democrat and man of the people: I
have fought the battle of my country, and I
die a Roman hero. You are too many for
me, gentlemen—twelve hundred men against
one, and a regiment of scalping savages behind
you! I surrender, and I am ready to die.
I am a democrat. But what is one democrat
among twelve hundred hired myrmidons of
power? I know you'll kill me, but I don't

care: all I ask of you is to do justice to my
memory, to bear witness before the world”—
(here his voice was almost drowned in sobs,)
—“to bear witness that I die like a brave man
—die like a hero—die like a patriot—the
victim of despots and martyr of freedom!”

Great were the consternation and confusion
that now prevailed. The man was mad—
mad north-north-west, and all round the compass,
politically mad—a mad patriot; nobody
doubted that. Some asked, what was to be
done: others would have argued the madman
out of his frenzy; others again slipped out of
the door, and stood ready for a run.

In the meanwhile, the maniac, reinspired
by his own eloquence, or the pusillanimity of
his enemies, which even a madman might
perceive, lifted up his voice again, but lifted
it in a tone of defiance.

“You are the hired myrmidons of power!”
he cried, “purse-proud rich men—tyrants
that grind the face of the poor—that live on
the sweat of the poor man's labour, and rob
his hungry children of their food! I am a
poor man, and the poor man's friend: I hate
you, I defy you, I call you to the reckoning.
Yes!” he roared, snatching up his knife from
the floor, and then waving it aloft, as if to

unseen backers; “your triumph is now over,
your hour has come: I call you to the reckoning—to
the reckoning of blood!—Advance,
men of the people, and cut their tyrannical
throats!”

And with that, he advanced himself, flourishing
his ferocious weapon against our
aristocratic breasts. There was no withstanding
that terrific charge: pellmell we
went, one over the other, out the door, which
we esteemed ourselves fortunate in being able
to close, and thus secure upon the distracted
assailant.

We then made our way down to the barroom,
where we found the glum host and his
haughty spouse in as great alarm and as
elegant deshabille as ourselves, they, and,
indeed, every soul in the house, having been
aroused by the madman's vociferations.

What was now, to be done? The unfortunate
man was still raging; we could hear
him thumping against the door, as if endeavouring
to break through, and roaring all
the while a frenzied cry of “victory!” With
that savage knife in his hand—nay, with a
dozen knives perhaps—for arms and clothes
were all, in the hurry of our flight, left together
in the room—who should dare attack

and disarm him? Nobody showed an appetite
for the enterprise; and although the ugly
landlady proposed, in her ecstacy of terror,
a plan that might have ended the difficulty—
namely, that some of us should take her husband's
gun, and shoot the bedlamite through
the key hole, (and, really, she did not seem
to consider the shooting a mad Yankee any
very atrocious crime,)—the business was ended
by our sitting up all night in the bar-room,
in extremely simple costume, debating the
difficulty.

The terrible din with which we had been
ousted from the garret, did not continue long;
but was succeeded, first, by a dead, portentous
calm, then by a strange half groaning,
half snorting kind of noise, that was represented
by some who had the courage once
or twice to creep slyly to the garret door to
listen, to be peculiarly terrific, and which, indeed,
lasted all night long.

When the morning broke, we held another
consultation, and finally, growing more courageous
as the day grew broader, wrought
ourselves to the resolution of proceeding in
a body to the traveller's room, the landlord
magnanimously leading the van, armed with
a broad-axe; ourselves intrepidly following at

his heels, some carrying such means of defence
as could be gathered up, and others
cart-ropes and bed-cords to tie the madman,
and mine hostess behind with a bulldog.
We paused a moment at the door, listening
to the groaning sound, which was still kept
up, and then soft y entered the room; where
we had the satisfaction of finding the poor
fellow lying very soundly and comfortably
asleep in the best bed, sending from his upturned
nostrils those anomalous and horrid
sounds, which now appeared to us the natural
music of sleep. He opened his eyes,
stared upon us somewhat inquiringly, yet
with a look so extremely natural and lucid
that we refrained from laying hands upon
him, as we supposed would have been necessary.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” said he, quite
like a sensible person; “a fine morning we
have after the rain. And a very fine sleep
I've had too,” he added: “I hope you can
say the same?”

“It's his lucid moment, poor devil,” said
the Varmint; and gathering up our indispensables,
we all went down to breakfast.

The Yankee was now the observed of all
observers—as solemn, as sad, as modest as

ever, and to all appearances, quite unconscious
of his late paroxysm. We were all
too prudent, or generous, to remind him of it,
even by a distant hint; and, for the same
reasons, we all took care not to cross him in
any thing at table. Whatever dish he looked
at was immediately surrendered to him; even
the ugly landlady requested his acceptance of
a tumbler of cream she had poured out for
her own use, but on which he chanced to
cast his eye. And thus it happened that
our gentleman, whose appetite had by no
means suffered from his affliction, ate the
best, as well as the hugest breakfast of all;
after which, he ordered his horse, called for
and paid his bill, with every air of sanity;
and then, with every air of sanity, departed.

A few moments after, we were ourselves
upon the road thundering along in our mail-coach;
and by and by caught sight of our
extra lodger on the top of a hill, at a cross
road, where, indeed, he seemed waiting for
us, as he looked back upon us frequently,
while we slowly mounted the hill.

“Mad again!” quoth the braying gentleman,
with an air of commiseration—“Poor
devil!”

“Gentlemen,” said the madman, touching

his hat with an air of great suavity, and giving
the sweetest intonation to his sepulchral
voice, “I believe I forgot to bid you farewell:
at all events, I omitted to express my thanks
for the uncommon kindness you all displayed
in giving me, a poor afflicted Yankee pedler,
so much more bed-room than I had any occasion
for.”

“Oh,” said the Tennessean, having some
doubt about the poor fellow's meaning, but
willing to humour him to the best of his
power—“it is our southern way; hospitality,
sir, mere hospitality.”

“Sir,” said the pedler, with a grateful look,
“I shall always remember it. But I do assure
you, one bed would have served my purpose
just as well as a dozen.”

“No doubt, sir,” said the Varmint; “but
the truth is, as you were a sick man —”

“Only a little affliction in my head,” said
the stranger, touching his cracked os frontis.

“Yes, sir—a little affliction”—rejoined the
Tennessean; “for which reason, each man
desired to give you his bed; and that,” added
the gentleman, pleased at his ingenuity, “is
the reason you had all the beds!”

The pedler gave us a satanic grin, and
touching his forehead again, exclaimed, after

sneezing and blowing his nose in a highly
natural manner, “Remember me, gentlemen!
I have an affliction here, to be sure, but—I
never lost a bed by it!”

With that, he whipped up his horse, and
cheering him on the way with a laugh that
sounded like the chuckle of a kettle-drum, it
was so deep and tremendous, left us to our
meditations.

“Bitten!” said the Varmint, giving a sneaking
look around him.

“Choused out of bed—humbugged, every
man of us!” growled the Alabamian.

The Mississippian jumped on his feet, and
roaring—“Bray, gentlemen, bray—we are all
jackasses together!” set us the example, by
pouring his most exquisitely donkeyish note
upon the ears of morning.