ound
The warmest welcome at an inn.

Fynes Morrison tells of the comforts of English inns even as early as
the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1617 he wrote:--

"The world affords not such inns as England hath, for as soon as a
passenger comes the servants run to him; one takes his horse and
walks him till he be cold, then rubs him and gives him meat; but
let the master look to this point. Another gives the traveller his
private chamber and kindles his fire, the third pulls off his
boots and makes them clean; then the host or hostess visits
him--if he will eat with the host--or at a common table it will be
4d. and 6d. If a gentleman has his own chamber, his ways are
consulted, and he has music, too, if he likes."

[Illustration: The Wheelwrights' Arms, Warwick]

The literature of England abounds in references to these ancient inns.
If Dr. Johnson, Addison, and Goldsmith were alive now, we should find
them chatting together at the Authors' Club, or the Savage, or the
Athenaeum. There were no literary clubs in their days, and the public
parlours of the Cock Tavern or the "Cheshire Cheese" were their clubs,
wherein they were quite as happy, if not quite so luxuriously housed,
as if they had been members of a modern social institution. Who has
not sung in praise of inns? Longfellow, in his _Hyperion_, makes
Flemming say: "He who has not been at a tavern knows not what a
paradise it is. O holy tavern! O miraculous tavern! Holy, because no
carking cares are there, nor weariness, nor pain; and miraculous,
because of the spits which of themselves turned round and round." They
appealed strongly to Washington Irving, who, when recording his visit
to the shrine of Shakespeare, says: "To a homeless man, who has no
spot on this wide world which he can truly call his own, there is a
momentary feeling of something like independence and territorial
consequence, when after a weary day's travel he kicks off his boots,
thrusts his feet into slippers, and stretches himself before an inn
fire. Let the world without go as it may; let kingdoms rise or fall,
so long as he has the wherewithal to pay his bill, he is, for the time
being, the very monarch of all he surveys.... 'Shall I not take mine
ease in mine inn?' thought I, as I gave the fire a stir, lolled back
in my elbow chair, and cast a complacent look about the little parlour
of the Red Horse at Stratford-on-Avon."

[Illustration: Entrance to t