Mrs. Fairbank doesn’t view the study of agricultural human nature with my relish.  Her fidgety horse will not allow her a moment’s repose; she is beginning to lose her temper.

“We can’t go fourteen miles in this way,” she says.  “Where is the nearest inn?  Ask that brute in the field!”

I take a shilling from my pocket and hold it up in the sun.  The shilling exercises magnetic virtues.  The shilling draws the peasant slowly toward me from the middle of the field.  I inform him that we want to put up the horses and to hire a carriage to take us back to Farleigh Hall.  Where can we do that?  The peasant answers (with his eye on the shilling): 

“At Oonderbridge, to be zure.” (At Underbridge, to be sure.)

“Is it far to Underbridge?”

The peasant repeats, “Var to Oonderbridge?”—­and laughs at the question.  “Hoo-hoo-hoo!” (Underbridge is evidently close by—­if we could only find it.) “Will you show us the way, my man?” “Will you gi’ oi a drap of zyder?” I courteously bend my head, and point to the shilling.  The agricultural intelligence exerts itself.  The peasant joins our melancholy procession.  My wife is a fine woman, but he never once looks at my wife—­and, more extraordinary still, he never even looks at the horses.  His eyes are with his mind—­and his mind is on the shilling.

We reach the top of the hill—­and, behold on the other side, nestling in a valley, the shrine of our pilgrimage, the town of Underbridge!  Here our guide claims his shilling, and leaves us to find out the inn for ourselves.  I am constitutionally a polite man.  I say “Good morning” at parting.  The guide looks at me with the shilling between his teeth to make sure that it is a good one.  “Marnin!” he says savagely—­and turns his back on us, as if we had offended him.  A curious product, this, of the growth of civilization.  If I didn’t see a church spire at Underbridge, I might suppose that we had lost ourselves on a savage island.

II

Arriving at the town, we had no difficulty in finding the inn.  The town is composed of one desolate street; and midway in that street stands the inn—­an ancient stone building sadly out of repair.  The painting on the sign-board is obliterated.  The shutters over the long range of front windows are all closed.  A cock and his hens are the only living creatures at the door.  Plainly, this is one of the old inns of the stage-coach period, ruined by the railway.  We pass through the open arched doorway, and find no one to welcome us.  We advance into the stable yard behind; I assist my wife to dismount—­and there we are in the position already disclosed to view at the opening of this narrative.  No bell to ring.  No human creature to answer when I call.  I stand helpless, with the bridles of the horses in my hand.  Mrs. Fairbank saunters gracefully down the length of the yard and does—­what all women do, when they find themselves in a strange place.  She opens every door as she passes it, and peeps in.  On my side, I have just recovered my breath, I am on the point of shouting for the hostler for the third and last time, when I hear Mrs. Fairbank suddenly call to me: