But that humbler type of hostelry so often represented in sketches of English rural life and scenery—­the little, cozy, one-story, wayside, or hamlet inn, with its thatched roof, checker-work window, low door, and with a loaded hay-cart standing in front of it, while the driver, in his round, wool hat, and in his smock-frock, is drinking at a pewter mug of beer, with one hand on his horse’s neck--this the hand of modern improvements has not yet reached.  This may be found still in a thousand villages and hamlets, surrounded with all its rural associations; the green, the geese, and gray donkeys feeding side by side; low-jointed cottages, with long, sloping roofs greened over with moss or grass, and other objects usually shadowed dimly in the background of the picture.  It is these quiet hamlets and houses in the still depths of the country, away from the noise and bluster of railway life and motion, that best represent and perpetuate the primeval characteristics of a nation.  These the American traveller will find invested with all the old charm with which his fancy clothed them.  It will well repay him for a month’s walk to see and enjoy them thoroughly.

In these days of sun-literature, whose letters are human faces, and whose new volumes are numbered by the million yearly, without a duplicate to one of them, I am confident that a volume of these English village inns of the olden school, in photographs, would command a large sale and admiration in America, merely as specimens of unique and interesting architecture.  A thousand might be taken, every one as unlike the other in distinctive form and feature, as every one of the same number of men would be to the other.

The diversification of names, being more difficult, is still more remarkable.  Although the spread eagle figures largely as the patron genius of American hotels, still nine-tenths of them bear the names of states, counties, towns, or national or local celebrities.  But here natural history comes out strong and wide.  The heraldry of sovereigns, aristocracy, gentry, commercial and industrial interests, puts up its various arms upon hundreds of inns in town and country.  All occupations and recreations are well represented.  Thus no country in the world approaches England in the wide scope and play of hotel nomenclature.  Some of the combinations are exceedingly unique and most interesting in their incongruity.  Dickens has not exaggerated this characteristic; not even done it justice in his hotel scenes.  Things are put together on a hundred tavern signs that were never joined before in the natural or moral world, and put together frequently in most grotesque association.  For instance, there is a large, first-class inn right in the very heart of London, which has for a sign, not painted on a board, but let into the wall of the upper story, in solid statuary, a huge human mouth opened to its utmost capacity, and a bull, round and plump, standing stoutly on its four legs between the