The scene of the first four chapters of "A Message from the Sea," is laid in "Steepways, North Devon, England," the name Dickens gives to Clovelly, and the story opens with a faithful and unmistakable description of one of the most beautiful and quaintest villages in England. To it comes Captain Jorgan to unravel a sea mystery, but no reference is made to his staying at the inn there. The task he has set himself, however, eventually takes him to another adjacent village, which Dickens calls Lanrean. There he puts up at the King Arthur's Arms, to identify which we must first identify Lanrean. That Dickens had a certain village near Clovelly in mind, there is little doubt, for he and Wilkie Collins, who collaborated in writing the story, went there for the purpose. Their description of Clovelly being so accurate and meticulous, it is only natural that Lanrean has a prototype, and, if found, the original of King Arthur's Arms would be forthcoming. The original of the Peal of Bells, the village ale-house, in "Tom Tiddler's Ground," on the other hand, has been discovered, for Mr. Traveller seeking Mr. Mopes the Hermit, naturally had to go where Mr. Mopes the Hermit located himself. This we know to have been near Stevenage, and F. G. Kitton identified the ale-house as the White Hart there, where Dickens called on his way to see Lucas, the original of Mr. Mopes, to enquire of the landlord, old Sam Cooper, the shortest route to his "ruined hermitage" some five miles distant. No particular coffee-houses were, we suspect, intended for the Slamjam Coffee-House or the Admiral Nelson Civic and General Dining Rooms, mentioned in "Somebody's Luggage"; nor can we hope to identify the George and the Gridiron, where the waiters supported nature by what they found in the plates, "which was, as it happened, and but too often thoughtlessly, immersed in mustard," or what was found in the glasses, "which rarely went beyond driblets and lemons." No name either is given to the inn in "Mugby Junction" where the traveller arrived at past three o'clock on a tempestuous morning and found himself stranded. Having got his two large black portmanteaux on a truck, the porter trundled them on "through a silent street" and came to a stop. When the owner had shivered on the pavement half an hour, "what time the porter's knocks at the inn door knocked up the whole town first, and the inn last, he groped his way into the close air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made." It is known that Mugby stood for Rugby, but that is all. The particular shut-up inn, if it ever had any original, has not, so far as we are aware, been discovered. In _A Christmas Carol_ we are told that Scrooge "took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker's book, went home to bed."