ch places, and perhaps ages back, to members
of my race; and when I was a child I tried to invent appropriate
games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them with
the proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank
gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be
haunted; certain coasts are set aside for shipwreck. Other spots
again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable,
"miching mallecho." The inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours
and green garden and silent, eddying river--though it is known
already as the place where Keats wrote some of his _Endymion_
and Nelson parted from his Emma--still seems to wait the coming
of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls, behind
these old green shutters, some further business smoulders,
waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's ferry
makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from
the town, beside the pier, in a climate of its own, half inland,
half marine--in front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the
guard-ship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with
the trees. Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and
Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the _Antiquary_.
But you need not tell me--that is not all; there is some story,
unrecorded or not yet complete, which must express the meaning
of that inn more fully.... I have lived both at the Hawes and
Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heel, as it seemed, of
some adventure that should justify the place; but though the
feeling had me to bed at night and called me again at morning in
one unbroken round of pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me
in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come;
but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's
ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a
horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the
green shutters at the inn at Burford.

--R.L. STEVENSON, _A Gossip on Romance_.

_FROM "MIDNIGHT IN LONDON"_

Clang! Clang! Clang! the fire-bells! Bing! Bing! Bing! the
alarm! In an instant quiet turns to uproar--an outburst of
noise, excitement, clamor--bedlam broke loose; Bing! Bing! Bing!
Rattle, clash and clatter. Open fly the doors; brave men mount
their boxes. Bing! Bing!