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vessel staggering on two feet instead of three, is a cutaneous kind
of sauce of brown pimples and pickled cucumber. You order the
bill, but your waiter cannot bring your bill yet, because he is
bringing, instead, three flinty-hearted potatoes and two grim head
of broccoli, like the occasional ornaments on area railings, badly
boiled. You know that you will never come to this pass, any more
than to the cheese and celery, and you imperatively demand your
bill; but, it takes time to get, even when gone for, because your
waiter has to communicate with a lady who lives behind a sashwindow
in a corner, and who appears to have to refer to several
Ledgers before she can make it out – as if you had been staying
there a year. You become distracted to get away, and the other
waiter, once more changing his leg, still looks at you – but
suspiciously, now, as if you had begun to remind him of the party
who took the great-coats last winter. Your bill at last brought
and paid, at the rate of sixpence a mouthful, your waiter
reproachfully reminds you that ‘attendance is not charged for a
single meal,’ and you have to search in all your pockets for
sixpence more. He has a worse opinion of you than ever, when you
have given it to him, and lets you out into the street with the air
of one saying to himself, as you cannot again doubt he is, ‘I hope
we shall never see YOU here again!’
Or, take any other of the numerous travelling instances in which,
with more time at your disposal, you are, have been, or may be,
equally ill served. Take the old-established Bull’s Head with its
old-established knife-boxes on its old-established sideboards, its
old-established flue under its old-established four-post bedsteads
in its old-established airless rooms, its old-established
frouziness up-stairs and down-stairs, its old-established cookery,
and its old-established principles of plunder. Count up your
injuries, in its side-dishes of ailing sweetbreads in white
poultices, of apothecaries’ powders in rice for curry, of pale
stewed bits of calf ineffectually relying for an adventitious
interest on forcemeat balls. You have had experience of the oldestablished
Bull’s Head stringy fowls, with lower extremities like
wooden legs, sticking up out of the dish; of its cannibalic boiled
mutton, gushing horribly among its capers, when carved; of its
little dishes of pastry – roofs of spermaceti ointment, erected
over half an apple or four gooseberries. Well for you if you have
yet forgotten the old-established Bull’s Head fruity port: whose
reputation was gained solely by the old-established price the
Bull’s Head put upon it, and by the old-established air with which
the Bull’s Head set the glasses and D’Oyleys on, and held that
Liquid Gout to the three-and-sixpenny wax-candle, as if its oldestablished
colour hadn’t come from the dyer’s.
Or lastly, take to finish with, two cases that we all know, every
day.
We all know the new hotel near the station, where it is always
gusty, going up the lane which is always muddy, where we are sure
to arrive at night, and where we make the gas start awfully when we
open the front door. We all know the flooring of the passages and
staircases that is too new, and the walls that are too new, and the
house that is haunted by the ghost of mortar. We all know the
doors that have cracked, and the cracked shutters through which we
get a glimpse of the disconsolate moon. We all know the new
people, who have come to keep the new hotel, and who wish they had
never come, and who (inevitable result) wish WE had never come. We
all know how much too scant and smooth and bright the new furniture
is, and how it has never settled down, and cannot fit itself into
right places, and will get into wrong places. We all know how the
gas, being lighted, shows maps of Damp upon the walls. We all know
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how the ghost of mortar passes into our sandwich, stirs our negus,