our real dread at evening was--the American country hotel. With the best
wish in the world, it is impossible to be enthusiastic over the American
country hotel. How ironically the kindly old words used to come floating
to me out of Shakespeare each evening as the shadows fell, and the lights
came out in the windows--"to take mine ease at mine inn;" and assuredly
it was on another planet that Shenstone wrote:

_Whoe'er hath travelled life's dull round,
Whate'er his fortunes may have been,
Must sigh to think he still has found
His warmest welcome at an inn_.

Had Shenstone been writing in an American country hotel, his tune would
probably have been more after this fashion: "A wonderful day has come to
a dreary end in the most sepulchral of hotels, a mouldy, barn-like place,
ill-lit, mildewed and unspeakably dismal. A comfortless room with two
beds and two low-power electric lights, two stiff chairs, an
uncompanionable sofa, and some ghastly pictures of simpering naked women.
We have bought some candles, and made a candlestick out of a soap-dish.
Colin is making the best of it with 'The Beloved Vagabond,' and I have
drawn up one of the chairs to a table with a mottled marble top, and am
writing this amid a gloom which you could cut with a knife, and which is
so perfect of its kind as to be almost laughable. But for the mail, which
we found with unutterable thankfulness at the post-office, I hardly dare
think what would have happened to us, to what desperate extremities we
might not have been driven, though even the possibilities of despair seem
limited in this second-hand tomb of a town...."

Here Colin looks up with a wry smile and ironically quotes from the
wisdom of Paragot: "What does it matter where the body finds itself, so