In Rutland, a beautiful little city nestling in a kind of basin high up among the Green Mountains of Vermont, I arrived one night at a late hour. I went to a good comfortable hotel—for they have such there—and asked for a “single room.” The host regretted that he had no single rooms unoccupied. Passengers from the earlier trains had taken them all. He could put me in a double-bedded room where another guest had just retired—one who appeared to be a “perfect gentleman:” that was the best he could do. It was the best _I_ could do, too; so, I was shown to the room.
I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket, and, not being perfectly sure that the man in the other bed was a perfect angel, I thought there would be no harm in placing it in the watch-fob of my unimpeachables, and placing the same rolled up in a ball, under my neck. I did so. When morning came, the “other fellow” got up first, and I felt somewhat amused when I chanced to observe—for I was awake, and dreading to “turn out” on account of the sharp morning air—that he had done so too. We had both taken each other for rogues.
Well, that is the right way to view every stranger when you are traveling. Look on every man you meet, and especially if he speaks to you, as a deep-dyed villain, till you have had the most incontrovertible proof that he is not.
I made Boston my head-quarters, while visiting different portions of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts; and about the last of February, I departed for Philadelphia. I didn’t try the “dark-blue sea” again; but took the “Shore Line” railroad, stopping a short time in Providence, New Haven and New York.
I arrived in New York one March evening, and, allowing my baggage to go on to Philadelphia, resolved to remain in the city that night and go to the “Quaker City” next day. I wanted to go _via_ the Camden and Amboy Railroad, and was told that the boat—for passengers on this road take the boat from New York to South Amboy, a distance of twenty-eight miles—would leave at six in the morning. That evening, while in the sitting-room of my old hotel, I observed two suspicious-looking fellows eyeing me rather sharply, and I felt that they were entitled to a little watching from me. So, I watched them. When I retired, I locked and bolted my door and even braced it with my crutch. [A handy thing to have in a house, sometimes.] I slept soundly till five o’clock, at which time the porter, according to instructions, knocked at my door and awoke me.