It was now Christmas-eve.  I should have had a dismal Christmas-time of it anywhere, and consequently that did not so much matter; still, being snowed up was like dying of frost, a thing I had not bargained for.  I felt very lonely.  Yet I could no more have proposed to the landlord and landlady to admit me to their society (though I should have liked it—­very much) than I could have asked them to present me with a piece of plate.  Here my great secret, the real bashfulness of my character, is to be observed.  Like most bashful men, I judge of other people as if they were bashful too.  Besides being far too shamefaced to make the proposal myself, I really had a delicate misgiving that it would be in the last degree disconcerting to them.

Trying to settle down, therefore, in my solitude, I first of all asked what books there were in the house.  The waiter brought me a Book of Roads, two or three old Newspapers, a little Song-Book, terminating in a collection of Toasts and Sentiments, a little Jest-Book, an odd volume of Peregrine Pickle, and the Sentimental Journey.  I knew every word of the two last already, but I read them through again, then tried to hum all the songs (Auld Lang Syne was among them); went entirely through the jokes,—­in which I found a fund of melancholy adapted to my state of mind; proposed all the toasts, enunciated all the sentiments, and mastered the papers.  The latter had nothing in them but stock advertisements, a meeting about a county rate, and a highway robbery.  As I am a greedy reader, I could not make this supply hold out until night; it was exhausted by tea-time.  Being then entirely cast upon my own resources, I got through an hour in considering what to do next.  Ultimately, it came into my head (from which I was anxious by any means to exclude Angela and Edwin), that I would endeavour to recall my experience of Inns, and would try how long it lasted me.  I stirred the fire, moved my chair a little to one side of the screen,—­not daring to go far, for I knew the wind was waiting to make a rush at me, I could hear it growling,—­and began.

My first impressions of an Inn dated from the Nursery; consequently I went back to the Nursery for a starting-point, and found myself at the knee of a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose, and a green gown, whose specially was a dismal narrative of a landlord by the roadside, whose visitors unaccountably disappeared for many years, until it was discovered that the pursuit of his life had been to convert them into pies.  For the better devotion of himself to this branch of industry, he had constructed a secret door behind the head of the bed; and when the visitor (oppressed with pie) had fallen asleep, this wicked landlord would look softly in with a lamp in one hand and a knife in the other, would cut his throat, and would make him into pies; for which purpose he had coppers, underneath a trap-door, always boiling; and rolled