Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?
FALSTAFF.
DURING a jourhat I once made through the herlands, I had arrived one evening at the Pomme dOr, the principal inn of a small Flemish village. It was after the hour of the table dhote, so that I was obliged to make a solitary supper from the relics of its ampler board. The weather was chilly; I was seated alone in one end of a great gloomy dining-room, and, my repast being over, I had the prospect before me of a long dull evening, without any visible means of enlivening it. I summoned mine host and requested something to read; he brought me the whole literary stock of his household, a Dutch family Bible, an almana the same language, and a number of old Paris neers. As I sat dozing over one of the latter, reading old news and stale criticisms, my ear was now and then struck with bursts of laughter which seemed to proceed from the kit. Every ohat has travelled on the ti must know how favorite a resort the kit of a try inn is to the middle and inferior order of travellers, particularly in that equivocal kind of weather when a ?re bees agreeable toward evening. I threw aside the neer and explored my way to the kit, to take a peep at the group that appeared to be so merry. It was posed partly of travellers who had arrived some hours before in a diligence, and partly of the usual attendants and hangers-on of inns. They were seated round a great burove, that might have been mistaken for an altar at which they were worshipping. It was covered with various kit vessels of resple brightness, among which steamed and hissed a huge copper tea-kettle. A large lamp threw a strong mass of light upon the group, bringing out many odd features in strong relief. Its yelloartially illumihe spacious kit, dying duskily away into remote ers, except where they settled in mellow radian the broad side of a ?itch of ba or were re?ected back from well-scoured utensils that gleamed from the midst of obscurity. A strapping Flemish lass, with long golden pendants in her ears and a necklace with a golde suspeo it, was the presiding priestess of the temple.
Many of the pany were furnished with pipes, and most of them with some kind of evening potation. I found their mirth was occasioned by aes which a little swarthy Fren, with a dry weazen fad large whiskers, was giving of his love-adventures; at the end of each of which there was one of those bursts of ho unceremonious laughter in which a man indulges in that temple of true liberty, an inn.
As I had er mode of getting through a tedious blustering evening, I took my seat he stove, and listeo a variety of travellers tales, some very extravagant and most ver dull.
All of them, however, have faded from my treaemory except one, which I will endeavor to relate. I fear, however, it derived its chief zest from the manner in which it was told, and the peculiar air and appearance of the narrator. He was a corpulent old Swiss, who had the look of a veteran traveller. He was dressed in a tarnished green travelling-jacket, with a broad belt round his waist, and a pair of overalls with buttons from the hips to the ankles. He was of a full rubid tenance, with a double , aquiline nose, and a pleasant twinkling eye.
His hair was light, and curled from under an old gree travelling-cap stu one side of his head. He was interrupted more than once by the arrival of guests or the remarks of his auditors, and paused now and then to replenish his pipe; a