Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned by Christopher Morley
page 100 of 211 (47%)
page 100 of 211 (47%)
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To speak merely by sudden memory, for instance, there was the fine
old hotel in Burlington, Vermont--is it called the _Van Ness House_?--where we remember a line of cane-bottomed chairs on a long shady veranda, where one could look out and see the town simmering in that waft of hot and dazzling sunshine that pours across Lake Champlain in the late afternoon: and _The Black Lion_, Lavenham, Suffolk; where (unless we confuse it with a pub in Bury St. Edmunds where we had lunch), there was, in the hallway, a very fine old engraving called "Pirates Decoying a Merchantman," in which one pirate, dressed in woman's clothes, stood up above the bulwarks waving for assistance, while the cutlassed ruffians crouched below ready to do their bloody work when the other ship came near enough. Nor have we forgotten _The Saracen's Head_, at Ware, whence we went exploring down the little river Lea on Izaak Walton's trail; nor _The Swan_ at Bibury in Gloucestershire, hard by that clear green water the Colne; nor another _Swan_ at Tetsworth in Oxfordshire, which one reaches after bicycling over the beechy slope of the Chilterns, and where, in the narrow taproom, occurred the fabled encounter between a Texas Rhodes Scholar logged with port wine and seven Oxfordshire yokels who made merry over his power of carrying the red blood of the grape. Our friend C.F.B., while we were meditating these golden matters, wrote to us that he is going on a walking or bicycling trip in England next summer, and asks for suggestions. We advise him to get a copy of Muirhead's "England" (the best general guidebook we have seen) and look up his favourite authors in the index. That will refer him to the places associated with them, and he can have rare sport in hunting them out. There is no way of pilgrimage so pleasant as to follow the spoor of a well-loved writer. Referring to our |
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