Where the books in the
windows always wanted the first, last, and middle leaves, and where
the one man was always arriving at some unusual hour in the night,
and requiring his breakfast at a similarly singular period of the
day. I have no doubt we could all be very eloquent on the comforts
of our favourite hotel, wherever it was--its beds, its stables, its
vast amount of posting, its excellent cheese, its head waiter, its
capital dishes, its pigeon-pies, or its 1820 port. Or possibly we
could recal our chaste and innocent admiration of its landlady, or
our fraternal regard for its handsome chambermaid. A celebrated
domestic critic once writing of a famous actress, renowned for her
virtue and beauty, gave her the character of being an "eminently
gatherable-to-one's-arms sort of person." Perhaps some one amongst
us has borne a somewhat similar tribute to the mental charms of the
fair deities who presided at our hotels.
With the travelling characteristics of later times, we are all, no
doubt, equally familiar. We know all about that station to which
we must take our ticket, although we never get there; and the other
one at which we arrive after dark, certain to find it half a mile
from the town, where the old road is sure to have been abolished,
and the new road is going to be made--where the old neighbourhood
has been tumbled down, and the new one is not half built up.
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