bowsprit.
Now, you come down to Pavilionstone in a free and easy manner, an
irresponsible agent, made over in trust to the South-Eastern
Company, until you get out of the railway-carriage at high-water
mark. If you are crossing by the boat at once, you have nothing to
do but walk on board and be happy there if you can – I can’t. If
you are going to our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, the sprightliest
porters under the sun, whose cheerful looks are a pleasant welcome,
shoulder your luggage, drive it off in vans, bowl it away in
trucks, and enjoy themselves in playing athletic games with it. If
you are for public life at our great Pavilionstone Hotel, you walk
into that establishment as if it were your club; and find ready for
you, your news-room, dining-room, smoking-room, billiard-room,
music-room, public breakfast, public dinner twice a-day (one plain,
one gorgeous), hot baths and cold baths. If you want to be bored,
there are plenty of bores always ready for you, and from Saturday
to Monday in particular, you can be bored (if you like it) through
and through. Should you want to be private at our Great
Pavilionstone Hotel, say but the word, look at the list of charges,
choose your floor, name your figure – there you are, established in
your castle, by the day, week, month, or year, innocent of all
comers or goers, unless you have my fancy for walking early in the
morning down the groves of boots and shoes, which so regularly
flourish at all the chamber-doors before breakfast, that it seems
to me as if nobody ever got up or took them in. Are you going
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Dickens, Charles – Reprinted Pieces
across the Alps, and would you like to air your Italian at our
Great Pavilionstone Hotel? Talk to the Manager – always
conversational, accomplished, and polite. Do you want to be aided,
abetted, comforted, or advised, at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel?
Send for the good landlord, and he is your friend. Should you, or
any one belonging to you, ever be taken ill at our Great
Pavilionstone Hotel, you will not soon forget him or his kind wife.
And when you pay your bill at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, you
will not be put out of humour by anything you find in it.
A thoroughly good inn, in the days of coaching and posting, was a
noble place. But no such inn would have been equal to the
reception of four or five hundred people, all of them wet through,
and half of them dead sick, every day in the year. This is where
we shine, in our Pavilionstone Hotel. Again – who, coming and
going, pitching and tossing, boating and training, hurrying in, and
flying out, could ever have calculated the fees to be paid at an
old-fashioned house? In our Pavilionstone Hotel vocabulary, there
is no such word as fee. Everything is done for you; every service
is provided at a fixed and reasonable charge; all the prices are
hung up in all the rooms; and you can make out your own bill
beforehand, as well as the book-keeper.
In the case of your being a pictorial artist, desirous of studying
at small expense the physiognomies and beards of different nations,
come, on receipt of this, to Pavilionstone. You shall find all the
nations of the earth, and all the styles of shaving and not
shaving, hair cutting and hair letting alone, for ever flowing
through our hotel. Couriers you shall see by hundreds; fat
leathern bags for five-franc pieces, closing with violent snaps,
like discharges of fire-arms, by thousands; more luggage in a
morning than, fifty years ago, all Europe saw in a week. Looking
at trains, steamboats, sick travellers, and luggage, is our great
Pavilionstone recreation. We are not strong in other public
amusements. We have a Literary and Scientific Institution, and we
have a Working Men’s Institution – may it hold many gipsy holidays
in summer fields, with the kettle boiling, the band of music
playing, and the people dancing; and may I be on the hill-side,
looking on with pleasure at a wholesome sight too rare in England!