which he stood, a wooden house, half painted, with a dirty piazza
(unroofed) in front, and a sign board hung on a slanting pole–bearing
the legend, “Hotel. P. Dusenheimer,” a sawmill further down the stream,
a blacksmith-shop, and a store, and three or four unpainted dwellings of
the slab variety.
As Philip approached the hotel he saw what appeared to be a wild beast
crouching on the piazza. It did not stir, however, and he soon found
that it was only a stuffed skin. This cheerful invitation to the tavern
was the remains of a huge panther which had been killed in the region a
few weeks before. Philip examined his ugly visage and strong crooked
fore-arm, as he was waiting admittance, having pounded upon the door.
“Yait a bit. I’ll shoost–put on my trowsers,” shouted a voice from the
window, and the door was soon opened by the yawning landlord.
“Morgen! Didn’t hear d’ drain oncet. Dem boys geeps me up zo spate.
Gom right in.”
Philip was shown into a dirty bar-room. It was a small room, with a
stove in the middle, set in a long shallow box of sand, for the benefit
of the “spitters,” a bar across one end–a mere counter with a sliding
glass-case behind it containing a few bottles having ambitious labels,
and a wash-sink in one corner. On the walls were the bright yellow and
black handbills of a traveling circus, with pictures of acrobats in human
pyramids, horses flying in long leaps through the air, and sylph-like
women in a paradisaic costume, balancing themselves upon the tips of
their toes on the bare backs of frantic and plunging steeds, and kissing
their hands to the spectators meanwhile.
As Philip did not desire a room at that hour, he was invited to wash
himself at the nasty sink, a feat somewhat easier than drying his face,
for the towel that hung in a roller over the sink was evidently as much a
fixture as the sink itself, and belonged, like the suspended brush and
comb, to the traveling public. Philip managed to complete his toilet by
the use of his pocket-handkerchief, and declining the hospitality of the
landlord, implied in the remark, “You won’d dake notin’?” he went into
the open air to wait for breakfast.
The country he saw was wild but not picturesque. The mountain before him
might be eight hundred feet high, and was only a portion of a long
unbroken range, savagely wooded, which followed the stream. Behind the
hotel, and across the brawling brook, was another level-topped, wooded
range exactly like it. Ilium itself, seen at a glance, was old enough to
be dilapidated, and if it had gained anything by being made a wood and
water station of the new railroad, it was only a new sort of grime and
rawness. P. Dusenheimer, standing in the door of his uninviting
groggery, when the trains stopped for water; never received from the
traveling public any patronage except facetious remarks upon his personal
appearance. Perhaps a thousand times he had heard the remark, “Ilium
fuit,” followed in most instances by a hail to himself as “AEneas,” with
the inquiry “Where is old Anchises? “At first he had replied, “Dere
ain’t no such man;” but irritated by its senseless repetition, he had
latterly dropped into the formula of, “You be dam.”
Philip was recalled from the contemplation of Ilium by the rolling and
growling of the gong within the hotel, the din and clamor increasing till
the house was apparently unable to contain it; when it burst out of the
front door and informed the world that breakfast was on the table.
The dining room was long, low and narrow, and a narrow table extended its
whole length. Upon this was spread a cloth which from appearance might
have been as long in use as the towel in the barroom. Upon the table was
the usual service, the heavy, much nicked stone ware, the row of plated
and rusty castors, the sugar bowls with the zinc tea-spoons sticking up
in them, the piles of yellow biscuits, the discouraged-looking plates of
butter. The landlord waited, and Philip was pleased to observe the