g in the booking-office, without nearly so
strong a smell of kippers and dirt.'

I do not think my friend ventured upon the Blue Boar; but I did, a
dozen years earlier, and stayed there for two nights. I wonder if any
other new arrival from Australia has done that! Hardly, I think. And
yet there is something to be said for it. It was quite inexpensive, as
London hotels go. (They are all much more expensive than Australian
hotels, though the cost of living in England is appreciably lower than
it is in the Antipodes.) And putting up there obviates the
embarrassing necessity of taking a cab from the station, when you
cannot think of a place to which you can tell the man to drive.

I cherish the thought that I have become something of a tradition at
the Blue Boar, where I have reason to think I am probably remembered
to-day by a now aged Boots and others--many, many others--as 'The
genelmun as orduder bawth.'

On rising after my first insomnious night there, I went prowling all
about the house in search of the bathroom. Finally, I was routed back
to my room by a newly-wakened maid (in curl-pins), who told me rather
crossly that I could not have a 'bawth' unless I ordered it
'before'and.' She did not say how long beforehand. But I was in a
hurry to get out of doors, so I did without my bath, and promised
myself I would see to it later in the day.

That afternoon, footsore, tired, and feeling inexpressibly grimy, I
interviewed the lady again, and begged permission to have a bath. She
was then in a much brighter humour, and in curls in place of pins. She
promised to arrange the matter shortly, and send some accredited
representative to warn me when the psychological moment arrived. Where
could I be found?

'Oh, I'll go and undress at once,' I said.

'No, don't do that, sir; I cawn't get a bawth all in a minute,' she
told me. 'Perhaps you'd like to wite in the smokin'-room.'

Grateful for the absence of the morning's crossness I agreed at once,
and retired to the fly-blown smoking-room, where there was ample
choice of distraction for a writing man between a moth-eaten volume
called _King's Concordance_ and a South-Eastern Railway time-table
cover, very solidly fashioned, with lots of crimson and gold, but no
inside. Here I smoked half a pipe, and would have rested, but that I
felt too dirty. Presently Boots came in, elderly and sad but furtively
bird-like, both in the way he held his head on one side and in the
jerky q