til the road had been cut out by
labourers from the market-town. When they might cut their way to the
Holly-Tree nobody could tell me.

It was now Christmas-eve. I should have had a dismal Christmas-time of
it anywhere, and consequently that did not so much matter; still, being
snowed up was like dying of frost, a thing I had not bargained for. I
felt very lonely. Yet I could no more have proposed to the landlord and
landlady to admit me to their society (though I should have liked it--very
much) than I could have asked them to present me with a piece of plate.
Here my great secret, the real bashfulness of my character, is to be
observed. Like most bashful men, I judge of other people as if they were
bashful too. Besides being far too shamefaced to make the proposal
myself, I really had a delicate misgiving that it would be in the last
degree disconcerting to them.

Trying to settle down, therefore, in my solitude, I first of all asked
what books there were in the house. The waiter brought me a _Book of
Roads_, two or three old Newspapers, a little Song-Book, terminating in a
collection of Toasts and Sentiments, a little Jest-Book, an odd volume of
_Peregrine Pickle_, and the _Sentimental Journey_. I knew every word of
the two last already, but I read them through again, then tried to hum
all the songs (Auld Lang Syne was among them); went entirely through the
jokes,--in which I found a fund of melancholy adapted to my state of
mind; proposed all the toasts, enunciated all the sentiments, and
mastered the papers. The latter had nothing in them but stock
advertisements, a meeting about a county rate, and a highway robbery. As
I am a greedy reader, I could not make this supply hold out until night;
it was exhausted by tea-time. Being then entirely cast upon my own
resources, I got through an hour in considering what to do next.
Ultimately, it came into my head (from which I was anxious by any means
to exclude Angela and Edwin), that I would endeavour to recall my
experience of Inns, and would try how long it lasted me. I stirred the
fire, moved my chair a little to one side of the screen,--not daring to
go far, for I knew the wind was waiting to make a rush at me, I could
hear it growling,--and began.

My first impressions of an Inn dated from the Nursery; consequently I
went back to the Nursery for a starting-point, and found myself at the
knee of a sallow woman with a fishy eye, an aquiline nose, and a gre