hing higher than a man's stature, furnished
on either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in ancient
Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a narrow table--a
table expected under stress to accommodate no less than four pairs of
active British elbows. High pressure indeed had passed away from the
Red Lion for ever. It now knew only that of memories and ghosts and
atmosphere. Round the room there marched, breast-high, a magnificent
panelling of mahogany, so dark with time and so polished with unremitted
friction that by gazing a while into its lucid blackness I made out
the dim reflexion of a party of wigged gentlemen in knee-breeches just
arrived from York by the coach. On the dark yellow walls, coated by
the fumes of English coal, of English mutton, of Scotch whiskey, were a
dozen melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age--the Derby favourite of
the year 1807, the Bank of England, her Majesty the Queen. On the floor
was a Turkey carpet--as old as the mahogany almost, as the Bank
of England, as the Queen--into which the waiter had in his lonely
revolutions trodden so many massive soot-flakes and drops of overflowing
beer that the glowing looms of Smyrna would certainly not have
recognised it. To say that I ordered my dinner of this archaic type
would be altogether to misrepresent the process owing to which, having
dreamed of lamb and spinach and a salade de saison, I sat down in
penitence to a mutton-chop and a rice pudding. Bracing my feet against
the cross-beam of my little oaken table, I opposed to the mahogany
partition behind me the vigorous dorsal resistance that must have
expressed the old-English idea of repose. The sturdy screen refused even
to creak, but my poor Yankee joints made up the deficiency.

While I was waiting there for my chop there came into the room a person
whom, after I had looked at him a moment, I supposed to be a fellow
lodger and probably the only one. He seemed, like myself, to have
submitted to proposals for dinner; the table on the other side of my
partition had been prepared to receive him. He walked up to the fire,
exposed his back to it and, after consulting his watch, looked directly
out of the window and indirectly at me. He was a man of something less
than middle age and more than middle stature, though indeed you would
have called him neither young nor tall. He was chiefly remarkable for
his emphasised leanness. His hair, very thin on the summit of his he