ut possessions or
friends, a mere poor nameless orphan, when on a solitary journey. There
is, moreover, a sadder feeling than this in the heart of the more
sentimental traveller, who has engaged the hospitality of friends. _He
knows it is extended equally to others_; that this room, which he may
have made peculiarly his own, filling it, perhaps, in proportion to the
briefness of sojourn, with his own most personal experience; the
landscape made his own through this window, the crucial conversation,
receiving unexpected sympathies, held or (more potent still) thought
over afterwards in that chair; he knows that this room will become,
perhaps, O horror, within a few hours, another's!

The extraordinary hospitality of England, becoming, like all English
things, rather too well done materially, rather systematic, and
therefore heartless, inflicts, I have been told, some painful blows on
sentimental aliens, particularly of Latin origin. There is a pang in
finding on the hospitable door a label-holder with one's name in it: it
saves losing one's way, but suggests that one is apt to lose it, is a
stranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future,
each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated from
nefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability,
with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure.
And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness of
housemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth,
take heed and imprint my urgent wishes in thy faithful heart: never,
never, never, in my small southern home (not unlike, I sometimes fondly
fancy, the Poet's _parva domus_), never let me surprise thee depositing
thy freshly-whitened linen in heaps outside the door of the departing
guest; and never, I conjure thee, offend his eye or nostril with mops,
or _frotteur's_ rollers, or resinous scent of furniture-polish near his
small chamber! For that chamber, kindly Handmaiden, is _his_. He is the
Prophet it was made for; and the only Prophet conceivable as long as
present. And when he takes departure, why, the void must follow, a long
hiatus, darkness, and stacked-up furniture, and the scent of varnish
within tight-closed shutters....

But, alas! alas! not all kind Thestylis's doing and refraining is able
to dispel the natural sense of coming and going: one's bed re-made,
one's self replaced, new boxes brought and unpacked, metap