Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/346

332 towering Malvern range, and on the other the Bredon heights, standing blue and lofty, like opposite pillars to the broad gateway of one of the most magnificent vales in England. Just between the feet of the two main Lickey Hills is nestled a snug, quiet little hotel, called "The Rose and Crown," associated in my mind to a memory which can never attach with such lively interest to any other way-side inn in England. For it was the first that I ever entered for a night's lodging. I had just arrived from America, in the leafy month of June, 1846, and that very day had commenced that foot tour which I resumed and completed in 1863-4. Good Joseph Sturge, that afternoon, had buckled on my knapsack and set me on the road at Edgbaston, and I had made a sauntering walk to this little cosy old inn, just as the setting sun was pouring its slanting cloud of glory into the green gorge. It was just the English way-side inn I had read and dreamed of from youth; just the one I was to meet in the programme of the tour sketched by fancy before leaving home. Everything around and in it was thoroughly English, to the watering-trough, the settle under the shade trees, the skittle-grounds, beer-mugs and all. And there was the landlady—I should have recognized her in New York—a regular Saxon-faced and Saxon-haired woman, buxom, bland, and radiant.