The White Hart of Tarningham was a neat little country inn, such as was commonly found in most of the small towns of England at the period of my tale. They are rapidly being brushed off the face of the earth by the great broom of the steam-engine, and very soon the "pleasures of an inn" will be no longer known but by the records of history, while men run through the world at the rate of a hundred miles an hour, finding nothing on their way but stations and "hotels." I hate the very name hotel. It is unEnglish, uncomfortable, unsatisfactory, a combination, I suppose, of host and hell, the one the recipient of perturbed spirits, and the other their tormentor. But the word inn, how comfortable it is in all its significations. We have only retained the double _n_ in it that we may "wear our rue with a difference," and whether we think of being _in_ place, or _in_ power, or _in_ the hearts of those we love, or _in_ the house during a storm, how pleasant is the feeling it produces. It has a home-like and British sound, and I do with all my heart wish that my fellow-countrymen would neither change their words nor their manners for worse things of foreign parentage. An inn, in the days I speak of, was a place famous for white linen, broiled ham, and fresh eggs. I cannot say that the beefsteaks were always tender, or the veal cutlets always done to a turn, or the beds always the softest in the world, but then think of the white dimity curtains, and the casements that rattled just enough to let you know that it was blowing hard without, and the rosy apple-faced chambermaid, and the host himself, round as his own butts, ay, and as full of beer. An innkeeper of those days would have been ashamed to show himself under nineteen stone. He was a part of his own sign, the recommendation of his own ale. His very paunch seemed to say "Look what it has done for me." It entered into his fat, it flowed through his veins, it puffed out his cheeks, it ran out at his eyes, and malt and hops was heard in every accent of his tongue. You had no lean, wizen-faced, black-silk-stockinged innkeepers in those days, and the very aspiring waiters imitated their landlords, and hourly grew fat under the eye, that they might be in a fit condition to marry the widow and take the business when the poor dear gentleman was swallowed up in beer. Such an inn was the White Hart at Tarningham, and such a host was the landlord, but he was a wise man, and loved not to look upon his successors, for which cause, as well as on account of the trade not being very brisk in that quarter, he maintained no regular waiter; he had a tapster it is true, but the cloth in the neat little parlour on the left hand was laid by a white-capped, black-eyed, blooming maid-servant, and the landlord himself prepared to carry in the first dish, and then leave his expected guest to the tendance of the same fair damsel.