e. Something must have happened in
such places, and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and when I
was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I
still try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper story. Some
places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder;
certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart
for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive
and impenetrable, "miching mallecho." The inn at Burford Bridge, with
its arbours and green garden and silent, eddying river--though it is
known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his "Endymion" and
Nelson parted from his Emma--still seems to wait the coming of the
appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind these old green
shutters, some further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old
"Hawes Inn" at the Queen's Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy.
There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate of
its own, half inland, half marine--in front, the ferry bubbling with the
tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden
with the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and
Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of "The Antiquary." But you
need not tell me--that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or
not yet complete, which must express the meaning of that inn more fully.
So it is with names and faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and
inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some
quaint romance, which the all-careless author leaves untold. How many of
these romances have we not seen determined at their birth; how many
people have met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once
into trivial acquaintances; to how many places have we not drawn near,
with express intimations--"here my destiny awaits me"--and we have but
dined there and passed on! I have lived both at the Hawes and Burford in
a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that
should justify the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night
and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure and
suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour
had not yet come; but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the
Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a
horseman, on a tragic errand, rat