cks of all descriptions in all the rooms, which
are never right, unless taken at the precise minute when, by getting
exactly twelve hours too fast or too slow, they unintentionally become
so. Away I went, next, to the lesser roadside Inns of Italy; where all
the dirty clothes in the house (not in wear) are always lying in your
anteroom; where the mosquitoes make a raisin pudding of your face in
summer, and the cold bites it blue in winter; where you get what you can,
and forget what you can't: where I should again like to be boiling my tea
in a pocket-handkerchief dumpling, for want of a teapot. So to the old
palace Inns and old monastery Inns, in towns and cities of the same
bright country; with their massive quadrangular staircases, whence you
may look from among clustering pillars high into the blue vault of
heaven; with their stately banqueting-rooms, and vast refectories; with
their labyrinths of ghostly bedchambers, and their glimpses into gorgeous
streets that have no appearance of reality or possibility. So to the
close little Inns of the Malaria districts, with their pale attendants,
and their peculiar smell of never letting in the air. So to the immense
fantastic Inns of Venice, with the cry of the gondolier below, as he
skims the corner; the grip of the watery odours on one particular little
bit of the bridge of your nose (which is never released while you stay
there); and the great bell of St. Mark's Cathedral tolling midnight. Next
I put up for a minute at the restless Inns upon the Rhine, where your
going to bed, no matter at what hour, appears to be the tocsin for
everybody else's getting up; and where, in the table-d'hote room at the
end of the long table (with several Towers of Babel on it at the other
end, all made of white plates), one knot of stoutish men, entirely
dressed in jewels and dirt, and having nothing else upon them, _will_
remain all night, clinking glasses, and singing about the river that
flows, and the grape that grows, and Rhine wine that beguiles, and Rhine
woman that smiles and hi drink drink my friend and ho drink drink my
brother, and all the rest of it. I departed thence, as a matter of
course, to other German Inns, where all the eatables are soddened down to
the same flavour, and where the mind is disturbed by the apparition of
hot puddings, and boiled cherries, sweet and slab, at awfully unexpected
periods of the repast. After a draught of sparkling beer from a foaming
glas