, in
the very heart of the forest, he found a house, with lighted candles
and loud voices inside it. He looked up to see if there was a signboard.
There was none. "Not an inn after all!" said he sadly. "No matter; what
Christian would turn a dog out into this wood to-night?" and with this
he made for the door that led to the voices. He opened it slowly, and
put his head in timidly. He drew it out abruptly, as if slapped in the
face, and recoiled into the rain and darkness.

He had peeped into a large but low room, the middle of which was filled
by a huge round stove, or clay oven, that reached to the ceiling;
round this, wet clothes were drying-some on lines, and some more
compendiously, on rustics. These latter habiliments, impregnated with
the wet of the day, but the dirt of a life, and lined with what another
foot traveller in these parts call "rammish clowns," evolved rank
vapours and compound odours inexpressible, in steaming clouds.

In one corner was a travelling family, a large one: thence flowed into
the common stock the peculiar sickly smell of neglected brats. Garlic
filled up the interstices of the air. And all this with closed window,
and intense heat of the central furnace, and the breath of at least
forty persons.

They had just supped.

Now Gerard, like most artists, had sensitive organs, and the potent
effluvia struck dismay into him. But the rain lashed him outside, and
the light and the fire tempted him in.

He could not force his way all at once through the palpable perfumes,
but he returned to the light again and again, like the singed moth.
At last he discovered that the various smells did not entirely mix, no
fiend being there to stir them round. Odour of family predominated in
two corners; stewed rustic reigned supreme in the centre; and garlic in
the noisy group by the window. He found, too, by hasty analysis, that of
these the garlic described the smallest aerial orbit, and the scent of
reeking rustic darted farthest--a flavour as if ancient goats, or the
fathers of all foxes, had been drawn through a river, and were here
dried by Nebuchadnezzar.

So Gerard crept into a corner close to the door. But though the solidity
of the main fetors isolated them somewhat, the heat and reeking vapours
circulated, and made the walls drip; and the home-nurtured novice found
something like a cold snake wind about his legs, and his head turn to a
great lump of lead; and next, he felt like choking, sweet