Poor Travellers; how he ordered the materials for the feast to be
sent in from his own inn; how, when the feast was set upon the table,
"finer beef, a finer turkey, a greater prodigality of sauce and gravy,"
he never saw; and how "it made my heart rejoice to see the wonderful
justice my travellers did to everything set before them." All this and
much more, including "a jug of wassail" and the "hot plum-pudding and
mince pies," which "a wall-eyed young man connected with the fly
department at the hotel was, at a given signal, to dash into the
kitchen, seize, and speed with to Dr. Watts's Charity," was painted
with a warmth and colour that made my mouth water, even after the plate
of cold beef, the small loaf, and the unaccustomed allowance of porter.

"How like Dickens!" I exclaimed, with wet eyes, as I finished the
recital; "and he even waited in Rochester all night to give his poor
Travellers 'hot coffee and piles of bread and butter in the morning!'"

"Get along with you! he didn't do nothing of the sort."

"What! didn't he come here, as he says, and give the poor Travellers a
Christmas treat?"

Not a bit of it; as the matron, with indignation that seemed to have
lost nothing by lapse of years, forthwith demonstrated. There had been
no supper, no wassail, no hot coffee in the morning, and, in truth, no
meeting between Charles Dickens and the Travellers, at Christmas or at
any other time.

Indeed, the visitors' book testified that the visit had been paid on
May 11th, 1854, and not at Christmastide at all.

It was time to go to bed after that, and I left the matron to cool down
from the boiling-point to which she had been suddenly lifted at sight
of the ghost of 1854. My little room looked cheerless enough in the
candlelight, but I had brought sleep with me as a companion, and knew
that I should soon be as happy as if my bed were of down, and the
roof-tree that of Buckingham Palace.

And so in sooth I would have been but for the chimney. Why did the
otherwise unexceptional Master Watts insist upon the chimney? Such a
chimney it was, too, yawning across the full length of one side of the
room, and open straight up to the cold sky. There was--what I forgot
to mention in the inventory--a sort of tall clothes-horse standing
before the enormous aperture, and after trying various devices to keep
the wind out, I at last bethought me of the supernumerary blanket, and,
throwing it over the clothes-horse, I leaned it agai