erable importance.
While his wife, poor soul, performs all the menial offices about you,
which the domestics either cannot, or are not expected to perform, the
host himself is content to keep you in talk, which he not unfrequently
accomplishes by sitting down beside you, and helping you to discuss
your wine or beer. Nor does it inflict the slightest wound upon your
dignity, whatever your station in life may be, to fall in with his
humours. If you cut him short, you may miss the opportunity of learning
something which you could have wished to learn, and you are sure to
suffer from the diminished attention which is shown to you ever after.
If you indulge him, you may be bored for a while, it is true; but you
have the satisfaction of reflecting, that you neither wounded a private
man's feelings, nor offered wanton outrage to the customs of a
community.

Like my boy I was by this time getting tired and sleepy; and I cast
sundry wishful glances towards the heap of straw. The landlord
understood my situation, and hastened to assure me that we should have
the whole of the chamber to ourselves, and that if I would lie down,
the place should be cleared for us in a quarter of an hour. "For, to
tell you the truth," cried he, "we all sleep, my wife, and I, and the
children, and these wenches, in a little chamber beyond; the whole
house, large as you justly observed that it was, being occupied, either
as store-rooms for flour, or with the machinery of the mill." I begged
my friend not to put his household to the smallest inconvenience on my
account, and lying down beside my companion, closed my eyes.

I soon found, however, that sleep was out of the question. The
temperature of the apartment could not be less than a hundred degrees,
and there were so many dim lights and strange figures passing to and
fro, that all my efforts to abstract myself from them proved fruitless.
I therefore opened my eyes again, and lay to observe the issue. In a
short time landlord, landlady, and children withdrew. Then followed a
sort of clearing-up of odds and ends by the maidens, and last of all a
washing of feet and legs. This latter operation amused me exceedingly,
and I could not resist the inclination which I felt of complimenting
the lasses on their fair proportions. But they did not on that account
lower their drapery a jot. On the contrary they laughed heartily, and
chatted to me all the time their ablutions went forward, and wished me
a sound