elry, and its pitiable collapse
when the miserable travesty of victuals was laid before us, we fell
to thinking about some of the inns we had known of old time where
we had feasted not without good heart.

To speak merely by sudden memory, for instance, there was the fine
old hotel in Burlington, Vermont--is it called the _Van Ness
House_?--where we remember a line of cane-bottomed chairs on a long
shady veranda, where one could look out and see the town simmering
in that waft of hot and dazzling sunshine that pours across Lake
Champlain in the late afternoon: and _The Black Lion_, Lavenham,
Suffolk; where (unless we confuse it with a pub in Bury St. Edmunds
where we had lunch), there was, in the hallway, a very fine old
engraving called "Pirates Decoying a Merchantman," in which one
pirate, dressed in woman's clothes, stood up above the bulwarks
waving for assistance, while the cutlassed ruffians crouched below
ready to do their bloody work when the other ship came near enough.
Nor have we forgotten _The Saracen's Head_, at Ware, whence we went
exploring down the little river Lea on Izaak Walton's trail; nor
_The Swan_ at Bibury in Gloucestershire, hard by that clear green
water the Colne; nor another _Swan_ at Tetsworth in Oxfordshire,
which one reaches after bicycling over the beechy slope of the
Chilterns, and where, in the narrow taproom, occurred the fabled
encounter between a Texas Rhodes Scholar logged with port wine and
seven Oxfordshire yokels who made merry over his power of carrying
the red blood of the grape.

Our friend C.F.B., while we were meditating these golden matters,
wrote to us that he is going on a walking or bicycling trip in
England next summer, and asks for suggestions. We advise him to get
a copy of Muirhead's "England" (the best general guidebook we have
seen) and look up his favourite authors in the index. That will
refer him to the places associated with them, and he can have rare
sport in hunting them out. There is no way of pilgrimage so pleasant
as to follow the spoor of a well-loved writer. Referring to our
black note-book, in which we keep memoranda of a modest pilgrimage
we once made to places mentioned by two of our heroes, viz., Boswell
and R.L.S., we think that if we were in C.F.B.'s shoes, one of the
regions we would be most anxious to revisit would be Dove Dale, in
Derbyshire. This exquisite little valley is reached from Ashbourne,
where we commend the _Green Man Inn_ (visited