and its savoury smell of cooking;
there was the cafe with its bright windows, and its rattling of
dominoes; there was the dyer's with its strips of red cloth on the
doorposts; there was the silversmith's with its earrings, and its
offerings for altars; there was the tobacco dealer's with its lively
group of soldier customers coming out pipe in mouth; there were the bad
odours of the town, and the rain and the refuse in the kennels, and
the faint lamps slung across the road, and the huge Diligence, and its
mountain of luggage, and its six grey horses with their tails tied up,
getting under weigh at the coach office. But no small cabaret for a
straitened traveller being within sight, he had to seek one round the
dark corner, where the cabbage leaves lay thickest, trodden about the
public cistern at which women had not yet left off drawing water. There,
in the back street he found one, the Break of Day. The curtained windows
clouded the Break of Day, but it seemed light and warm, and it announced
in legible inscriptions with appropriate pictorial embellishment
of billiard cue and ball, that at the Break of Day one could play
billiards; that there one could find meat, drink, and lodgings, whether
one came on horseback, or came on foot; and that it kept good wines,
liqueurs, and brandy. The man turned the handle of the Break of Day
door, and limped in.

He touched his discoloured slouched hat, as he came in at the door, to
a few men who occupied the room. Two were playing dominoes at one of the
little tables; three or four were seated round the stove, conversing
as they smoked; the billiard-table in the centre was left alone for the
time; the landlady of the Daybreak sat behind her little counter among
her cloudy bottles of syrups, baskets of cakes, and leaden drainage for
glasses, working at her needle.

Making his way to an empty little table in a corner of the room behind
the stove, he put down his knapsack and his cloak upon the ground. As
he raised his head from stooping to do so, he found the landlady beside
him.

'One can lodge here to-night, madame?'

'Perfectly!' said the landlady in a high, sing-song, cheery voice.

'Good. One can dine--sup--what you please to call it?'

'Ah, perfectly!' cried the landlady as before. 'Dispatch then, madame,
if you please. Something to eat, as quickly as you can; and some wine at
once. I am exhausted.'

'It is very bad weather, monsieur,' said the landlady.

'Cursed weath