Wandering about for what seemed a long while, turning from one thoroughfare into another, so as to make pursuit uncertain, it finally crossed my mind that it was past my bedtime. Fear had driven away my hunger so completely that I thought no more of it till the next day. Brushing and rubbing as much of the coal-dust from my clothes as I could, I now walked boldly up to the counter of the Commercial Hotel, and said that I wanted to see the head-porter. The clerk eyed me curiously as he asked me what I desired of the head-porter. I wanted, I said, to black boots for a night’s lodging. The clerk called the chief-porter, and they both looked at me as a natural curiosity, I suppose, while they plied me with a few questions. They seemed pleased with my answers, or touched by my forlorn condition or my extreme youth, and decided that I might have a night’s lodging without blacking boots for it. Accordingly one of my questioners conducted me up into the highest story of the building, and, pointing to a bed in a large dormitory, left me in the society of some dozen or more snoring waiters and cooks. I knew in an instant the nature of the occupation of my room-mates, for I recognized on entering the apartment that post-culinary smell of dish-water with which custom had rendered me familiar, and which the philosophic nostril will, I think, almost always detect about those whose constant business it is to prepare or serve the prandial dish. When I think of that dark dormitory now, and the sounds that rose from it, I am reminded of a midsummer night’s frog-pond; but I regarded it far more seriously then. I know not by what chain of reasoning I established the connection between their stertorous idiosyncrasies and their waking employments, yet I remember very distinctly that I occupied myself, until I fell asleep, in assigning the proper rank and position to each of the snorers. The barytone, that came to me through the darkness from the far corner, I concluded, after some deliberation, was that of the chief-cook himself. Then there was a deep bass,--the real Mephistophelian hero of that opera of sleepers,--whose exact whereabout in the room I could never quite discover, for his note sounded each time in the place farthest from the one where I had heard it last, or expected to hear it next; this _basso cantante_, I had not the slightest doubt,--and I crouched lower on my pillow at the thought,--was that most inscrutable and relentless of tyrants, in all dining-halls and cabins, the head-waiter.