fty yards of that tremendous sickle.

That was a good Inn, too, with the kind, cheerful landlady and the honest
landlord, where I lived in the shadow of Mont Blanc, and where one of the
apartments has a zoological papering on the walls, not so accurately
joined but that the elephant occasionally rejoices in a tiger's hind legs
and tail, while the lion puts on a trunk and tusks, and the bear,
moulting as it were, appears as to portions of himself like a leopard. I
made several American friends at that Inn, who all called Mont Blanc
Mount Blank,--except one good-humoured gentleman, of a very sociable
nature, who became on such intimate terms with it that he spoke of it
familiarly as "Blank;" observing, at breakfast, "Blank looks pretty tall
this morning;" or considerably doubting in the courtyard in the evening,
whether there warn't some go-ahead naters in our country, sir, that would
make out the top of Blank in a couple of hours from first start--now!

Once I passed a fortnight at an Inn in the North of England, where I was
haunted by the ghost of a tremendous pie. It was a Yorkshire pie, like a
fort,--an abandoned fort with nothing in it; but the waiter had a fixed
idea that it was a point of ceremony at every meal to put the pie on the
table. After some days I tried to hint, in several delicate ways, that I
considered the pie done with; as, for example, by emptying fag-ends of
glasses of wine into it; putting cheese-plates and spoons into it, as
into a basket; putting wine-bottles into it, as into a cooler; but always
in vain, the pie being invariably cleaned out again and brought up as
before. At last, beginning to be doubtful whether I was not the victim
of a spectral illusion, and whether my health and spirits might not sink
under the horrors of an imaginary pie, I cut a triangle out of it, fully
as large as the musical instrument of that name in a powerful orchestra.
Human provision could not have foreseen the result--but the waiter mended
the pie. With some effectual species of cement, he adroitly fitted the
triangle in again, and I paid my reckoning and fled.

The Holly-Tree was getting rather dismal. I made an overland expedition
beyond the screen, and penetrated as far as the fourth window. Here I
was driven back by stress of weather. Arrived at my winter-quarters once
more, I made up the fire, and took another Inn.

It was in the remotest part of Cornwall. A great annual Miners' Feast
was being hol