Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/138

90 00 rOSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF

CHAPTER X.

CLEARING UP ALL DOUBTS (iF ANY EXISTED) OF THE DISINTER- ESTEDNESS OF MR. jingle's CHARACTER.

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There are in London several old inns, once the head quarters of celebrated coaches in the days when coaches performed their journeys in a graver and more solemn manner than they do in these times ; but which have now degenerated into little more than the abiding and booking places of country wagons. The reader would look in vain for any of these ancient hostelries, among the Golden Crosses and Bull and Mouths, which rear their stately fronts in the improved streets of London. If he would light upon any of these old places, he must direct his steps to the obscurer quarters of the town ; and there in some secluded nooks he will find several, still standing with a kind of gloomy sturdiness, amidst the modern innovations which surround them.

In the Borough especially, there still remain some half dozen old inns, which have preserved their external features unchanged, and which have escaped alike the rage for public improvement, and the encroach- ments of private speculation. Great, rambling, queer, old places they ftre, with galleries, and passages, and stair-cases, wide enough and anti- quated enough, to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories, supposing we should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any, and that the world should exist long enough to exhaust the innumer- able veracious legends connected with old London Bridge, and its adja- cent neighbourhood on the Surrey side.

It was in the yard of one of these inns — of no less celebrated a one than the White Hart — that a man was busily employed in brushing the dirt off a pair of boots, early on the morning succeeding the events narrated in the last chapter. He was habited in a coarse-striped waist- coat, with black calico sleeves, and blue glass buttons : drab breeches and leggings. A bright red handkerchief was wound in a very loose and unstudied style round his neck, and an old white hat was carelessly thrown on one side of his head. There were two rows of boots before him, one cleaned and the other dirty, and at every addition he made to the clean row, he paused from his work, and contemplated its results with evident satisfaction.

The yard presented none of that bustle and activity which are the usual characteristics of a large coach inn. Three or four lumbering wagons, each with a pile of goods beneath its ample canopy, about the height of the second-floor window of an ordinary house, were stowed away beneath a lofty roof which extended over one end of the yard ; and another, which was probably to commence its journey that morning, v.'a:« drawn out into the open space. A double tier of bed-room gal-