lay my head. Everything was, as they say in
England, "full up." It was coming on to rain and the night fell chill
and black. Would I have to use my rucksack for a pillow and sleep in
the fields?

At length I found a man--it was at quaint Godalming, I think, where the
famous Charterhouse School is--who could not give me a room, but
offered me a bed and breakfast at half a crown. "There's another
fellow up there," he said. "But he's a nice, quiet fellow; something
like yourself," he said. "I think you'll like him."

"You are an American," remarked my landlord. I sat with him in his
little parlour behind the bar. It had a gun over the mantelpiece, a
great deal of painted china and a group of stuffed birds in a glass
case. He asked me if I liked reading, because, if I did, he had an old
dictionary to which I was welcome at any time.

At length it was the hour for bed. I followed my heavy host with his
candle up difficult stairs. "I think they're all asleep," he said.

"They're all asleep!" I exclaimed. "Who are?"

"Why," replied my landlord, "there are five of them, you know. But
they are nice quiet fellows. Something like yourself," he added. "I
think you will like them."

In that shadowed, gabled room were the noises of many sunk in slumber.
Well, they were, I found in the morning, rather inoffensive young
fellows, all cyclists, and indeed not altogether unlike myself. It was
after my bacon and eggs that I found on my way a place for a "wash and
brush up, tuppence."

"Traveller, sir?" inquired the publican, in response to my knock and
peering cautiously out at his door. For it was Sunday, after three
o'clock in the afternoon and not yet six; and to obtain refreshment at
a public house at that hour one must be a "traveller over three miles'
journey." "I'm a traveller all the way from the U.S.A.," said I.

I stood my battered shilling ash stick in a corner and looked out again
from my window over the old red roofs and at the back of the house
where he dwelt who when the Queen had commanded his presence said, "I'm
an old man, ma'am, and I'll take a seat." When Annie, the maid, had
brought my "shaving water, sir," in a kind of a tin sprinkling can and
when I had used it I took up my Malacca town cane and went out to see
how old Father Thames was coming on.

I thought I would buy some writing paper and I went into a drug store
kind of a place. "I see you are an American, sir," said the shopman.
"