anybody’s mind or body but your own, and the
not-too-much-for-dinner, considering the price.
Next to the provincial Inns of France, with the great
church-tower rising above the courtyard, the horse-bells
jingling merrily up and down the street beyond, and
the clocks of all descriptions in all the rooms, which
are never right, unless taken at the precise minute
when, by getting exactly twelve hours too fast or
too slow, they unintentionally become so. Away
I went, next, to the lesser roadside Inns of Italy;
where all the dirty clothes in the house (not in wear)
are always lying in your anteroom; where the mosquitoes
make a raisin pudding of your face in summer, and
the cold bites it blue in winter; where you get what
you can, and forget what you can’t: where
I should again like to be boiling my tea in a pocket-handkerchief
dumpling, for want of a teapot. So to the old
palace Inns and old monastery Inns, in towns and cities
of the same bright country; with their massive quadrangular
staircases, whence you may look from among clustering
pillars high into the blue vault of heaven; with their
stately banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with
their labyrinths of ghostly bedchambers, and their
glimpses into gorgeous streets that have no appearance
of reality or possibility. So to the close little
Inns of the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants,
and their peculiar smell of never letting in the air.
So to the immense fantastic Inns of Venice, with
the cry of the gondolier below, as he skims the corner;
the grip of the watery odours on one particular little
bit of the bridge of your nose (which is never released
while you stay there); and the great bell of St. Mark’s
Cathedral tolling midnight. Next I put up for
a minute at the restless Inns upon the Rhine, where
your going to bed, no matter at what hour, appears
to be the tocsin for everybody else’s getting
up; and where, in the table-d’hote room at the
end of the long table (with several Towers of Babel
on it at the other end, all made of white plates),
one knot of stoutish men, entirely dressed in jewels
and dirt, and having nothing else upon them, will
remain all night, clinking glasses, and singing about
the river that flows, and the grape that grows, and
Rhine wine that beguiles, and Rhine woman that smiles
and hi drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my
brother, and all the rest of it. I departed thence,
as a matter of course, to other German Inns, where
all the eatables are soddened down to the same flavour,
and where the mind is disturbed by the apparition of
hot puddings, and boiled cherries, sweet and slab,
at awfully unexpected periods of the repast.
After a draught of sparkling beer from a foaming
glass jug, and a glance of recognition through the
windows of the student beer-houses at Heidelberg and
elsewhere, I put out to sea for the Inns of America,
with their four hundred beds apiece, and their eight
or nine hundred ladies and gentlemen at dinner every