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I one time went to look at lodgings in Patchin Place. I had heard that Patchin Place was America’s Latin Quarter. I thought it would be well to examine it. Patchin Place is a cul-de-sac behind Jefferson Market. A bizarre female person admitted me to the house there. It was not unreasonable to suppose that she had a certain failing. She slip-slod before me along a remarkably dark, rough-floored and dusty hall, and up a rickety stair. The lodging which she had to let was interesting but not attractive. The tenant, it seemed, who had just moved away had many faults trying to his landlady. He was very delinquent, for one thing, in the payment of his rent. And he was somewhat addicted to drink. This unfortunate propensity led him to keep very late hours, and caused him habitually to fall upstairs.

Well, I told her, by way of making talk, that I believed I was held to be a reasonably honest person, and that I was frequently sober.

“Oh,” she said, “I can see that you are a gentleman–in your way,” she added, in a murmur.

So, you see, in hunting lodgings you not only see how others live, but how you seem to others.

It is certainly curious, the places in which to dwell which one is shown in hunting lodgings. Once I was given to view a room in which was a strange table-like affair constructed of metal. “You wouldn’t mind, I suppose,” said the lady of the lodging, “if this remained in the room?”

“Oh, not at all,” I replied. “But what is it?”

“Why, it’s an operating table,” she explained. “Of course, you know,” she added, “that I’m a physician. And,” she continued, “of course I should want to make use of it now and then, but not regularly, not every day.”

To a lady with a patch over her eye with lodgings to let in Broome Street I one time stated, by way of being communicative, that I was often in my room a good deal doing some work there. Ah! With many ogles and grimaces, she whispered hoarsely, with an effort at a sly effect, that “that was all right here. She understood,” she said. Perfectly “safe place for that,” it was. “The gentlemen who had the room before were something of the same kind.”

As you know, “references” frequently are demanded of one hunting lodgings. To get into a really nice place one must really be a very nice person. “You know, I have a daughter,” sighs the really nice landlady.

To obtain lodgings in Kensington one must be very well-to-do, particularly if one would be on the “drawing room floor.” “I like these rooms very much,” I said to a prim person there, and I hesitated.

“But I suppose they are too dear for you,” she said.

How careful one must be hunting lodgings in England about “extras.” Lodgings made in the U.S.A. are all ready to live in, when you have paid your rent. But over on the other side, you recall, the rent, so amazingly cheap, is merely an item. Light, “coals,” linen, and “attendance” are all “extra.”

I met an interesting person letting lodgings in Whitechapel. She was not attractive physically. Her chief drapery was an apron. This, indeed, was fairly adequate before. But–I think she was like the ostrich who sticks his head in the sand.

My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent woman—— There are, by the way, people who will think anything. Some may say that I am ending this article rather abruptly.

My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent woman, used to say, in compositions at school when stumped by material too much for her, that she had in her eye, so to say, things “too numerous to mention.”

Anybody who would chronicle his adventures in hunting lodgings is confronted by incidents, humorous, wild, bizarre, queer, strange, peculiar, sentimental, touching, tragic, weird, and so on and so forth, “too numerous to mention.”