ours. Having thought
of the loch-trout, I was taken by quick association to the Anglers' Inns
of England (I have assisted at innumerable feats of angling by lying in
the bottom of the boat, whole summer days, doing nothing with the
greatest perseverance; which I have generally found to be as effectual
towards the taking of fish as the finest tackle and the utmost science),
and to the pleasant white, clean, flower-pot-decorated bedrooms of those
inns, overlooking the river, and the ferry, and the green ait, and the
church-spire, and the country bridge; and to the pearless Emma with the
bright eyes and the pretty smile, who waited, bless her! with a natural
grace that would have converted Blue-Beard. Casting my eyes upon my
Holly-Tree fire, I next discerned among the glowing coals the pictures of
a score or more of those wonderful English posting-inns which we are all
so sorry to have lost, which were so large and so comfortable, and which
were such monuments of British submission to rapacity and extortion. He
who would see these houses pining away, let him walk from Basingstoke, or
even Windsor, to London, by way of Hounslow, and moralise on their
perishing remains; the stables crumbling to dust; unsettled labourers and
wanderers bivouacking in the outhouses; grass growing in the yards; the
rooms, where erst so many hundred beds of down were made up, let off to
Irish lodgers at eighteenpence a week; a little ill-looking beer-shop
shrinking in the tap of former days, burning coach-house gates for
firewood, having one of its two windows bunged up, as if it had received
punishment in a fight with the Railroad; a low, bandy-legged,
brick-making bulldog standing in the doorway. What could I next see in
my fire so naturally as the new railway-house of these times near the
dismal country station; with nothing particular on draught but cold air
and damp, nothing worth mentioning in the larder but new mortar, and no
business doing beyond a conceited affectation of luggage in the hall?
Then I came to the Inns of Paris, with the pretty apartment of four
pieces up one hundred and seventy-five waxed stairs, the privilege of
ringing the bell all day long without influencing anybody's mind or body
but your own, and the not-too-much-for-dinner, considering the price.
Next to the provincial Inns of France, with the great church-tower rising
above the courtyard, the horse-bells jingling merrily up and down the
street beyond, and the clo