CHAPTER II.

THE GUEST.

Quis novus hic hospes?
_Dido apud Virgilium._

Ch'am-maid! The Gemman in the front parlour!

BOOTS'S _free Translation of the AEneid_.

It was on a fine summer's day that a solitary traveller rode under the
old-fashioned archway, and alighted in the court-yard of Meg Dods's inn,
and delivered the bridle of his horse to the humpbacked postilion.
"Bring my saddle-bags," he said, "into the house--or stay--I am abler, I
think, to carry them than you." He then assisted the poor meagre groom
to unbuckle the straps which secured the humble and now despised
convenience, and meantime gave strict charges that his horse should be
unbridled, and put into a clean and comfortable stall, the girths
slacked, and a cloth cast over his loins; but that the saddle should not
be removed until he himself came to see him dressed.

The companion of his travels seemed in the hostler's eye deserving of
his care, being a strong active horse, fit either for the road or field,
but rather high in bone from a long journey, though from the state of
his skin it appeared the utmost care had been bestowed to keep him in
condition. While the groom obeyed the stranger's directions, the latter,
with the saddle-bags laid over his arm, entered the kitchen of the inn.

Here he found the landlady herself in none of her most blessed humours.
The cook-maid was abroad on some errand, and Meg, in a close review of
the kitchen apparatus, was making the unpleasant discovery, that
trenchers had been broken or cracked, pots and saucepans not so
accurately scoured as her precise notions of cleanliness required,
which, joined to other detections of a more petty description, stirred
her bile in no small degree; so that while she disarranged and arranged
the _bink_, she maundered, in an under tone, complaints and menaces
against the absent delinquent.

The entrance of a guest did not induce her to suspend this agreeable
amusement--she just glanced at him as he entered, then turned her back
short on him, and continued her labour and her soliloquy of lamentation.
Truth is, she thought she recognised in the person of the stranger, one
of those useful envoys of the commercial community, called, by
themselves and the waiters, _Travellers_, par excellence--by others,
Riders and Bagmen. Now against this class of customers Meg had peculiar
prejudices; because, there being no shops in the old village of Saint