Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 476 pages of information about Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists.

Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 476 pages of information about Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists.

THE STOUT GENTLEMAN.

A STAGE-COACH ROMANCE.

  “I’ll cross it, though it blast me!”

  —­Hamlet.

It was a rainy Sunday, in the gloomy month of November.  I had been detained, in the course of a journey, by a slight indisposition, from which I was recovering; but I was still feverish, and was obliged to keep within doors all day, in an inn of the small town of Derby.  A wet Sunday in a country inn!—­whoever has had the luck to experience one can alone judge of my situation.

The rain pattered against the casements; the bells tolled for church with a melancholy sound.  I went to the windows, in quest of something to amuse the eye; but it seemed as if I had been placed completely out of the reach of all amusement.  The windows of my bed-room looked out among tiled roofs and stacks of chimneys, while those of my sitting-room commanded a full view of the stable-yard.  I know of nothing more calculated to make a man sick of this world, than a stable-yard on a rainy day.  The place was littered with wet straw, that had been kicked about by travellers and stable-boys.  In one corner was a stagnant pool of water, surrounding an island of muck; there were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable, crest-fallen cock, drenched out of all life and spirit; his drooping tail matted, as it were, into a single feather, along which the water trickled from his back; near the cart was a half-dozing cow chewing the cud, and standing patiently to be rained on, with wreaths of vapor rising from her reeking hide; a wall-eyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stable, was poking his spectral head out of the window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves; an unhappy cur, chained to a dog-house hard by, uttered something every now and then, between a bark and a yelp; a drab of a kitchen-wench tramped backwards and forwards through the yard in pattens, looking as sulky as the weather itself; every thing, in short, was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hard-drinking ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.

I was lonely and listless, and wanted amusement.  My room soon became insupportable.  I abandoned it, and sought what is technically called the travellers’-room.  This is a public room set apart at most inns for the accommodation of a class of wayfarers called travellers, or riders; a kind of commercial knights-errant, who are incessantly scouring the kingdom in gigs, on horseback, or by coach.  They are the only successors that I know of, at the present day, to the knights-errant of yore.  They lead the same kind of roving adventurous life, only changing the lance for a driving-whip, the buckler for a pattern-card, and the coat of mail for an upper Benjamin.  Instead of vindicating the charms of peerless beauty, they rove about spreading

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Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.