We have slept in many a chamber of that goodly and hospitable mansion: there was the bachelor's room, a nice little square apartment, about twice as high as it was broad, all panelled in oak, which, however, some Goth of a squire had painted light blue; with a fireplace that would let not only the bachelor, but eke the bachelor's better half, creep inside on a winter's night; and with a curious kind of a bed, not higher from the ground than your knee, but with thin light posts spiring up some dozen of feet aloft, and supporting a superfluity of green damask, enough to make a tent with. In the panel over the fireplace was an apology for a looking-glass, once deemed no doubt an uncommonly correct thing, all cut in facettes and diamonds at the sides and diversified with bouquets of flowers tied by true-lovers' knots in the middle. 'Twas no doubt a bridal gift to some fair lady in the time of King Charles, and then might have gloried in a frame of gold; but now its glories are departed, and, for us at least, it served no higher purpose than to display the horrors of our bristly chin. There's no position in the world more comfortable for a bedroom mirror than over the fireplace; shaving can there be conducted with science and with gusto. And every other panel opened by some wonderful kind of fastening, into a cupboard big enough to stow away more habiliments than ever in our bachelor days we were likely to possess. A quaint little goggle-eyed commode, tortured into fanciful elegance, filled up one corner of the room; and a nondescript _table de toilette_ occupied the other. Here, in a three-cornered arm-chair, the senior piece of furniture in the whole room, have we watched over the flickering ashes of the wood-fed fire for hours; and often when we had shaken hands with our worthy host at ten, have we prolonged our vigil till early morn, amused with the acute ribaldry of _Tom Jones_, or lost in the intricate wit of _Tristram Shandy_. The wintry blasts would make the old casement rattle, but we only gave the flaming log another turn,--crack! crack! would go the wood, over went another leaf of the book, and so we continued till taper and eyelid alike failed us.