One day we was sitting on a bench in The Slopes, enjoying a bit of sunshine that had just come along, when a middle-aged man, with a very high collar and a silk hat, came and sat down by Jone.  He spoke civilly to us, and then went on to say that if ever we happened to take a house near Liverpool he’d be glad to supply us with coals, because he was a coal merchant.  Jone told him that if he ever did take a house near Liverpool he certainly would give him his custom.  Then the man gave us his card.  “I come here every year,” he said, “for the rheumatism in my shoulder, and if I meet anybody that lives near Liverpool, or is likely to, I try to get his custom.  I like it here.  There’s a good many ’otels in this town.  You can see a lot of them from here.  There’s St. Ann’s, that’s a good house, but they charge you a pound a day; and then there’s the Old Hall.  That’s good enough, too, but nobody goes there except shopkeepers and clergymen.  Of course, I don’t mean bishops; they go to St. Ann’s.”

I wondered which the man would think Jone was, if he knew we was stopping at the Old Hall; but I didn’t ask him, and only said that other people besides shopkeepers and clergymen went to the Old Hall, for Mary Queen of Scots used to stop at that house when she came to take the waters, and her room was still there, just as it used to be.

“Mary Queen of Scots!” said he.  “At the Old Hall?”

“Yes,” said I, “that’s where she used to go; that was her hotel.”

“Queen Mary, Queen of the Scots!” he said again.  “Well, well, I wouldn’t have believed it.  But them Scotch people always was close-fisted.  Now if it had been Queen Elizabeth, she wouldn’t have minded a pound a day;” and then, after asking Jone to excuse him for forgetting his manners and not asking where his rheumatism was, and having got his answer, he went away, wondering, I expect, how Mary Queen of Scots could have been so stingy.

But although we could see so much sitting on benches, I didn’t give up Jone and the bath-chairs, and day before yesterday I got the better of him.  “Now,” said I, “it is stupid for you to be sitting around in this way as if you was a statue of a public benefactor carved by subscription and set up in a park.  The only sensible thing for you to do is to take a bath-chair and go around and see things.  And if you are afraid people will think you are being taken to a hospital, you can put down the top of the thing, and sit up straight and smoke your pipe.  Patients in ambulances never smoke pipes.  And if you don’t want me walking by your side like a trained nurse, I’ll take another chair and be pulled along with you.”

The idea of a pipe, and me being in another chair, rather struck his fancy, and he said he would consider it; and so that afternoon we went to the hotel door and looked at the long line of bath-chairs standing at the curbstone on the other side of the street, with the men waiting for jobs.  The chairs was all pretty much alike and looked very comfortable, but the men was as different as if they had been horses.  Some looked gay and spirited, and others tired and worn out, as if they had belonged to sporting men and had been driven half to death.  And then again there was some that looked fat and lazy, like the old horses on a farm, that the women drive to town.