quite free from a certain fragrant smell of tobacco, where the
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Dickens, Charles – Speeches, Literary & Social
cruets on the sideboard were usually absorbed by the skirts of the
box-coats that hung from the wall; where awkward servants waylaid
us at every turn, like so many human man-traps; where county
members, framed and glazed, were eternally presenting that petition
which, somehow or other, had made their glory in the county,
although nothing else had ever come of it. Where the books in the
windows always wanted the first, last, and middle leaves, and where
the one man was always arriving at some unusual hour in the night,
and requiring his breakfast at a similarly singular period of the
day. I have no doubt we could all be very eloquent on the comforts
of our favourite hotel, wherever it was – its beds, its stables,
its vast amount of posting, its excellent cheese, its head waiter,
its capital dishes, its pigeon-pies, or its 1820 port. Or possibly
we could recal our chaste and innocent admiration of its landlady,
or our fraternal regard for its handsome chambermaid. A celebrated
domestic critic once writing of a famous actress, renowned for her
virtue and beauty, gave her the character of being an “eminently
gatherable-to-one’s-arms sort of person.” Perhaps some one amongst
us has borne a somewhat similar tribute to the mental charms of the
fair deities who presided at our hotels.
With the travelling characteristics of later times, we are all, no
doubt, equally familiar. We know all about that station to which
we must take our ticket, although we never get there; and the other
one at which we arrive after dark, certain to find it half a mile
from the town, where the old road is sure to have been abolished,
and the new road is going to be made – where the old neighbourhood
has been tumbled down, and the new one is not half built up. We
know all about that party on the platform who, with the best
intentions, can do nothing for our luggage except pitch it into all
sorts of unattainable places. We know all about that short
omnibus, in which one is to be doubled up, to the imminent danger
of the crown of one’s hat; and about that fly, whose leading
peculiarity is never to be there when it is wanted. We know, too,
how instantaneously the lights of the station disappear when the
train starts, and about that grope to the new Railway Hotel, which
will be an excellent house when the customers come, but which at
present has nothing to offer but a liberal allowance of damp mortar
and new lime.
I record these little incidents of home travel mainly with the
object of increasing your interest in the purpose of this night’s
assemblage. Every traveller has a home of his own, and he learns
to appreciate it the more from his wandering. If he has no home,
he learns the same lesson unselfishly by turning to the homes of
other men. He may have his experiences of cheerful and exciting
pleasures abroad; but home is the best, after all, and its
pleasures are the most heartily and enduringly prized. Therefore,
ladies and gentlemen, every one must be prepared to learn that
commercial travellers, as a body, know how to prize those domestic
relations from which their pursuits so frequently sever them; for
no one could possibly invent a more delightful or more convincing
testimony to the fact than they themselves have offered in founding
and maintaining a school for the children of deceased or
unfortunate members of their own body; those children who now
appeal to you in mute but eloquent terms from the gallery.
It is to support that school, founded with such high and friendly
objects, so very honourable to your calling, and so useful in its
solid and practical results, that we are here to-night. It is to
roof that building which is to shelter the children of your
deceased friends with one crowning ornament, the best that any
building can have, namely, a receipt stamp for the full amount of
the cost. It is for this that your active sympathy is appealed to,