work. No visitor could have denied that the Dolphin was dying by
inches, but he showed no bright colours. He had once served
another master; there was a newer streak of paint below him,
displaying with inconsistent freshness the legend, By J. MELLOWS.
Page 150
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
My door opened again, and J. Mellows’s representative came back. I
had asked her what I could have for dinner, and she now returned
with the counter question, what would I like? As the Dolphin stood
possessed of nothing that I do like, I was fain to yield to the
suggestion of a duck, which I don’t like. J. Mellows’s
representative was a mournful young woman with eye susceptible of
guidance, and one uncontrollable eye; which latter, seeming to
wander in quest of stage-coaches, deepened the melancholy in which
the Dolphin was steeped.
This young woman had but shut the door on retiring again when I
bethought me of adding to my order, the words, ‘with nice
vegetables.’ Looking out at the door to give them emphatic
utterance, I found her already in a state of pensive catalepsy in
the deserted gallery, picking her teeth with a pin.
At the Railway Station seven miles off, I had been the subject of
wonder when I ordered a fly in which to come here. And when I gave
the direction ‘To the Dolphin’s Head,’ I had observed an ominous
stare on the countenance of the strong young man in velveteen, who
was the platform servant of the Company. He had also called to my
driver at parting, ‘All ri-ight! Don’t hang yourself when you get
there, Geo-o-rge!’ in a sarcastic tone, for which I had entertained
some transitory thoughts of reporting him to the General Manager.
I had no business in the town – I never have any business in any
town – but I had been caught by the fancy that I would come and
look at it in its degeneracy. My purpose was fitly inaugurated by
the Dolphin’s Head, which everywhere expressed past coachfulness
and present coachlessness. Coloured prints of coaches, starting,
arriving, changing horses, coaches in the sunshine, coaches in the
snow, coaches in the wind, coaches in the mist and rain, coaches on
the King’s birthday, coaches in all circumstances compatible with
their triumph and victory, but never in the act of breaking down or
overturning, pervaded the house. Of these works of art, some,
framed and not glazed, had holes in them; the varnish of others had
become so brown and cracked, that they looked like overdone piecrust;
the designs of others were almost obliterated by the flies
of many summers. Broken glasses, damaged frames, lop-sided
hanging, and consignment of incurable cripples to places of refuge
in dark corners, attested the desolation of the rest. The old room
on the ground floor where the passengers of the Highflyer used to
dine, had nothing in it but a wretched show of twigs and flowerpots
in the broad window to hide the nakedness of the land, and in
a corner little Mellows’s perambulator, with even its parasol-head
turned despondently to the wall. The other room, where post-horse
company used to wait while relays were getting ready down the yard,
still held its ground, but was as airless as I conceive a hearse to
be: insomuch that Mr. Pitt, hanging high against the partition
(with spots on him like port wine, though it is mysterious how port
wine ever got squirted up there), had good reason for perking his
nose and sniffing. The stopperless cruets on the spindle-shanked
sideboard were in a miserably dejected state: the anchovy sauce
having turned blue some years ago, and the cayenne pepper (with a
scoop in it like a small model of a wooden leg) having turned
solid. The old fraudulent candles which were always being paid for
and never used, were burnt out at last; but their tall stilts of
candlesticks still lingered, and still outraged the human intellect
by pretending to be silver. The mouldy old unreformed Borough
Member, with his right hand buttoned up in the breast of his coat,
and his back characteristically turned on bales of petitions from
his constituents, was there too; and the poker which never had been