xpert, the lawyer, the estate
agent, and numberless other persons, during the night meditated and
evolved advertisements. There was to be a continual stream week by week
after the inn was opened of ingenious advertisements. Altogether Mr.
Twist had his hands full.

The inn was to look artless and simple and small, while actually being
the last word in roomy and sophisticated comfort. It was to be as like
an old English inn to look at as it could possibly be got to be going on
his own and the twins' recollections and the sensationally coloured
Elizabethan pictures in the architect's portfolio. It didn't disturb Mr.
Twist's unprejudiced American mind that an English inn embowered in
heliotrope and arum lilies and eucalyptus trees would be odd and
unnatural, and it wouldn't disturb anybody else there either. Were not
Swiss mountain chalets to be found in the fertile plains along the
Pacific, complete with fir trees specially imported and uprooted in
their maturity and brought down with tons of their own earth attached to
their roots and replanted among carefully disposed, apparently Swiss
rocks, so that what one day had been a place smiling with orange-groves
was the next a bit of frowning northern landscape? And were there not
Italian villas dotted about also? But these looked happier and more at
home than the chalets. And there were buildings too, like small Gothic
cathedrals, looking as uncomfortable and depressed as a woman who has
come to a party in the wrong clothes. But no matter. Nobody minded. So
that an English inn added to this company, with a little German
beer-garden--only there wasn't to be any beer--wouldn't cause the least
surprise or discomfort to anybody.

In the end, the sole resemblance the cottage had to an English inn was
the signboard out in the road. With the best will in the world, and the
liveliest financial encouragement from Mr. Twist, the architect couldn't
in three weeks turn a wooden Californian cottage into an ancient
red-brick Elizabethan pothouse. He got a thatched roof on to it by a
miracle of hustle, but the wooden walls remained; he also found a real
antique heavy oak front door studded with big rusty nailheads in a San
Francisco curiosity shop, that would serve, he said, as a basis for any
wished-for hark-back later on when there was more time to the old girl's
epoch--thus did he refer to Great Eliza and her spacious days--and
meanwhile it gave the building, he alleged, a considerable