Boarding house

“ DEFINITIONS AND AXIOMS All boarding-houses are the same boarding-house.
Boarders in the same boarding-house and on the same flat are equal to one another.
A single room is that which has no parts and no magnitude.
The landlady of a boarding-house is a parallelogram—that is, an oblong angular figure, which cannot be described, but which is equal to anything. ”

“ The chief distinction between a boarding-house and an inn, and the one from which all others naturally flow, is that the keeper of a boarding-house can choose his own guests, admitting some and rejecting others, as to him in his discretion or according to his whims and humors may seem best; while an innkeeper is obliged to entertain all travelers of good conduct, and possessed of means of payment, who choose to stop at his house, and those who do stay he must provide with all they have occasion for while on their way. ”

“ The boarder watched him a little while and then said: "What on earth are you howling for? You don't have to eat it!"
In the soft firelight even the boarding-house sitting-room looked cozy and attractive. The warmth and comfort thawed the heart of the "star" boarder. He turned to the landlady and murmured. "Will you be my wife?"
"Let me see," replied the landlady, "you have been here four years. You have never once grumbled at the food or failed to pay my bill promptly and without question. No, sir, I'm sorry. You're too good a boarder to be put on the free list!" ”

“ I was not rich—on the contrary; and I had been told the Pension Beaurepas was cheap. I had further been told that a boarding-house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I was inclined to a literary career and a friend had said to me: “If you mean to write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house: there’s no other such way to pick up material.” ”

“ Remembering Aunt Ellen's beautiful home in California, which I visited fifteen years ago, I fear the change may be difficult, though, for a young person, not too painfully so, I trust. A boarding-house is the only home I have myself known for thirty years, and this particular one is excellent and full of interesting people, though the youngest among them are middle-aged. ”

“ The fact is, it is the idea of the boarding-house that all your friends shrink from. If you and your mother had taken a nice house in the country, not a large and expensive house, but a fairly respectable one, with a little ground round, I and other people I know might 120 have got ladies to live with you and to pay you well. ”

“ I pulled out the slide to which the curtains were attached, in front of one of the berths.
"Nothing could be better than that," replied the gentleman, with enthusiasm. "We are better lodged than we were in that boarding-house. The only fear is that we are intruding." ”

“ A DETECTIVE ON THE TRACK. Boarding-house life tends to make one selfish; “each for himself and God for us all,” is the boarders’ motto. Where people come and go, drifting in and out like weeds upon the tide, deep interests or affections are rare, but even in boarding-houses men are sometimes thoughtful, and women sympathetic. This is especially true in cases of illness. The medical lady and Mrs. Dumaresq rushed to the assistance of Prudence when she stumbled off the sofa in a dead faint. ”

“ IV—THE ISLAND BOARDING-HOUSE When you first take up your brief residence in the private hotel, as they term it—though I believe it is still called boarding-house in the plain-spoken island—your attitude towards your fellow-guests is perfectly clear; I mean your secret attitude, of course. Your secret attitude is that you have got among a queer and an unsympathetic set of people. ”

“ During my previous sojourn in London I lived as a student, sometimes in lodging houses and for sometime in a boarding house. The landlady of a boarding or a lodging house engages the house from the owner, engages cook and servants, and looks after the food and the cooking, and the lodger therefore has no bother whatever except paying weekly for his room and attendance and food. ”

“ But mere negative evils, so to speak, are not the worst that beset a young man who unwisely chooses a public hotel as a place for boarding. He is much more exposed to temptations there than in a private boarding-house, or at home. ”

“ Most of the contributors would be surprised to know that the cost of board and lodging at the "home" is precisely the same as it is outside, and much higher than a landsman of the same grade can live for in better style. With the exception of the sleeping accommodation, most men prefer the boarding-house, where, if they preserve the same commercial status which is a SINE QUA NON at the "home," they are treated like gentlemen ”

“ A boarding-house is a congeries of people who have come down. The proprietoress never dreamed that she would have to earn her own living like that—though she gets everything to a knife-edge certainty in the first week. Then in the drawing-room you have military people who have thundered, been saluted, been respected—and superseded. And nobody can make worse clothes look better. The cook explains why she’s not in Grosvenor Square, and the elderly Swiss waiter says that he has been in places where pace was not everytink. ”

“ Hobbs found himself detailed for the special service of watching Mrs. Booth.
p. 18CHAPTER IV
THE BOARDING-HOUSE AND BOARDERS
Mrs. Delfosse had “seen better days.” How it is that the profession of boarding-house keeping is for ever associated with a vista of past splendours history recordeth not. Other people hide past grandeur in the oblivion of silence, or shroud their social degeneracy even from their nearest friends. But the boarding-house keeper trumpets her past Arabian opulence from every vantage place her limited surroundings afford. ”

“ The Boarding House Train THE boarding house train of the older days was not an institution peculiar to the West alone, for we know that tramp outfits afforded protection to wanderers in ancient times, and even now in the Orient and for an agreed pecuniary consideration the peripatetic traveler may plod along as best he may, or possibly ride at times, and have the dust of the train and the society and fare of the Cameleers. ”

“ Boarding-house Keepers, having permission to enter the Landing Depot to solicit Boarders, must observe the following Rules:
12. Every Boarding-house Keeper must wear his badge in a conspicuous place on his breast when entering the Depot, and keep it so exposed while in the premises.
13. Every Boarding-house Keeper must present to passengers, when soliciting such passengers for his house, a card setting forth his name and residence, and the prices in gold and paper money charged for board and lodging by the day and week, and for each meal and night's lodging ”

“ The Sailors' Home as an institution is not over-popular with seamen, especially with the more improvident of them. And the improvident are certainly ninety per cent. of the total sea-going race of man. As a rule Homes cease to be such when a man's money is done. He is thrown out into the street or into some equivalent of the notorious Straw House. There is always much talk at sea about the relative advantages of Boarding-Houses and Homes, and half the arguments about the subject end in more or less of a "rough house" and a few odd black eyes. ”

“ From a social point of view it provides her with entire protection and respectability; she meets and makes friends with a nice class of men and women living in the house, and has a pleasant reception-room in which to receive visits. Madison Avenue and the side streets leading out of Fifth Avenue contain a rich choice of such boarding-houses, but here and there certain streets are considered undesirable places to live, and it is well to select a boarding-house which appears quiet and dignified in its aspect, and whose landlady has the same appearance. ”

“ It is not requisite in America to take a license from the police to establish a boarding-house, unless a bar-room be therewith connected. The person undertaking such an enterprise rents a house, makes it known in newspapers or among friends, or simply placards on the door 'Boarding'—and the establishment is opened without further ceremony. ”

“ Also beldames of incalculable antiquity,—a regular allowance of one to each boarding-house,—who flit noiselessly and unceasingly about the passages and up and down the stairways, admonishing you of their presence by a ghostly sniffle, which always frightens you, and prevents you from running into them and knocking them down. For these people, it is believed, a table is set in the houses where the boarders proper flatter their acquaintances that they sleep. It must be so, for the entire male population is constantly eating in the oyster-cellars. ”

“ "This is the subject," said Pierre Villiers. "It gives me scope to amuse and tell the truth at the same time. A man pierces a hole in the wall of a boarding-house room, and watches what is going on in the next room." ”

“ Perhaps because they really went to Covent Garden and Petticoat Lane and Saint Paul’s.... There’s not many stays ’ere long; them as stays, stays always. A man writing; pleased with making a single phrase stand for a description of a third-rate boarding-house, not seeing that it turned him into a third-rate boarding-house.... Stays always; always. But that meant boarders; perhaps only those boarders who did nothing at all but live in the house, waiting for their food ”

“ I was going to say something about our boarders the other day when I got run away with by my local reminiscences. I wish you to understand that we have a rather select company at the table of our boarding-house.
Our Landlady is a most respectable person, who has seen better days, of course,—all landladies have,—but has also, I feel sure, seen a good deal worse ones. ”

“ The newest boarder never coalesces with the group until the advent of another still newer, when he is tentatively admitted to ranks needing union against the latest intruder. This survival of prehistoric manners may be observed and experienced in any boarding-house. ”

“ The amount of money saved to emigrant families by this beneficial arrangement, in keeping them out of boarding-houses, is immense; for it embraces not only the reasonable board for a few days. Before the establishment of Castle Garden, emigrants in such difficulties would go to a boarding-house, and write to their friends for "money," not specifying amounts; the friends would send what they thought would pay for the passage, which was then swallowed up by the boarding-house bill, leaving the emigrant still without means to travel. ”

“ Living is very cheap here, especially in the so-called boarding-houses, where a man is well lodged and admirably boarded for two or three guineas a-week, and finds agreeable and easy society: equipages are not wanted, as sedan-chairs are still in use. ”

“ And, as machinery for such control, nearly all boarding-houses have the front ground floor divided into barroom and clothing-store, while in the rear is the dining-room and upstairs the bedrooms, each with as many beds as there is room for. Thus, a man may be housed, fed, clothed, drugged, and shipped from the same address. ”

“ Oh, these boarding-houses, these boarding-houses! What forlorn people one sees stranded on their desolate shores! Decayed gentlewomen with the poor wrecks of what once made their households beautiful, disposed around them in narrow chambers as they best may be, coming down day after day, poor souls! to sit at the board with strangers; their hearts full of sad memories which have no language but a sigh, no record but the lines of sorrow on their features ”

“ Boarding is an anomalous and enforced relation between people who offer and accept house-room, and only those can escape its blight who have the power always to elevate the commercial to the plane of the human and the friendly. Luckily, among this small but noble company are many persons that board and many that take boarders. The existence of this minority does not alter the fact that for most of us boarding is a demoralizing occupation. The reason lies deep: hospitality, given or received, is too sacred for barter.
VI
The Lady Alone at Night I AM a lady, and a coward. ”

“ People of experience tell awful stories about the miseries of boarding, and boarding-houses, and it is very clearly palpable to us that keepers of boarding-houses could a tale unfold of their own miseries, equal, if not double that of the luckless creatures who board. ”

“ These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as they will. The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally. The sitting-room has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who wish to meet may come together accidentally, (accidentally, I said, Madam, and I had not the slightest intention of Italicizing the word,) and discuss the social or political questions of the day, or any other subject that may prove interesting. ”

“ Boarding or rooming rather in one place, taking meals in another, is a great danger and one which her mother should guard against. Boarding houses are not much of an improvement, though in many cases a little more home life. ”

“ The outrageous way in which boarders sometimes act to their landlords and landladies show that these critical guests had bad early rearing, and that in the making-up of their natures all that constitutes the gentleman and lady were left out. Some of the most princely men and some of the most elegant women that I know of to-day keep hotels and boarding-houses. ”

“ The Intercolonial, Dominion Atlantic and Halifax and Southwestern Railway vacation folders give the address of numerous private boarding-houses and camps. ↑ In most Provincial towns branches will be found of at least one of the banks given opposite principal places in this list. ↑ At places where no hotels are indicated board can usually be secured in private houses. At very few outports are there hotels of any sort, or even boarding-houses which announce themselves as such. The people of all classes are well-disposed toward strangers and willingly give assistance in finding accommodation. ”