LEGAL DUTY. Passing now to the legal duty of exercising care, it should he borne in mind that this is relative, not absolute; and conse quently, when it has no existence between par ticular parties, there can be no such thing as negligence in the legal sense of the term. In other words, a man may be very careless without being negligent. To illustrate: the owner of a sugar orchard left a bucket of hot maple syrup uncovered in his woods. A neighbor's unruly cow jumped the fence, wandered into the woods, and died from drinking the syrup. Leaving the syrup thus was careless so far as protecting it from harm was concerned ; but it was not negligence toward the owner of the cow, for the owner of the syrup was under no legal duty to exercise ordinary ea re toward trespassers, and the act of the cow was a trespass (q.v.). Toward tres passers the duty of a landowner, a common car rier, or the like, is simply to refrain from in flieting willful or wanton injury. Toward a licensee, that is. one whom a person barely per mits to be upon his premises or in his N-ohiele. the licensor owes some duty of care; but the amount of care is slight. As a rule the licensee takes the risk of the situation. There must be
something like fraud on the part of the licensor before he eon lie held for injuries sustained by the licensee in falling info unguard ed excavations. or breaking through defective floors, staircases, pavements, or the like, or get ting caught hy unfenced niachinery or being thrown from a collapsing carriage. 'the licensor is bound, however, not to open new exeavations in or near a path which he knows licensees are accustomed to traverse, or to subject them to anything like man-traps or new and serious dangers without giving them warning. An or dinary guest is generally looked upon by the law as a mere licensee. Toward persons expressly or impliedly invited upon one's in a mat ter of common interest, the inviter is under a well-defined duty—the duty of making the prop erty reasonably safe. Ile is not under an abso lute duty to prevent harm, but only a duty to make the place as little dangerous as such a place would reasonably be, having regard to the ordinary exigencies of the business there car ried on.