tales of the hotel st crispian, chapter 12: "Farmer" Brown

by Horace P. Sternwall

edited by Dan Leo *

illustrated by rhoda penmarq and roy dismas

*Ass’t Professor of Classics and Religious Studies, Olney Community College; editor of Days of Despair, Nights of Ecstasy: The Memoirs of Horace P. Sternwall, Vol. 2.

Mr Phineas “Farmer” Brown had come to the city well over thirty years ago when he was a young man, ostensibly to seek his fortune. He had moved into his current rooms at the St Crispian during that first year, back when he still at least made a pretense of seeking his fortune or indeed any sort of paid employment at all. His monthly bills at the hotel were paid by his family’s banker back home in Peru, Indiana. The banker also remitted to the hotel the sum of three hundred dollars per month for Mr Brown’s “personal” expenses, with strict instructions that he was to receive no more than ten dollars of it on any given day. Mr Brown laughingly referred to this daily remittance as his “salary”, and he picked it up, in the form of nine or ten crisp one-dollar bills, at the front desk every morning at eleven-thirty on his way to the coffee shop for his breakfast.

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