Up the "wide dismantled staircase" was the best apartment, in which John Chester had his momentous interview with Geoffrey Haredale. This is known to-day, as we have already said, as the Chester Room. "It was spacious enough in all conscience, occupying the whole depth of the house, and having at either end a great bay window, as large as many modern rooms ... although the best room in the inn, it had the melancholy aspect of grandeur in decay, and was much too vast for comfort." This room exists to-day, and one can readily realise, on reading Dickens's meditation on its dullness and its chilly waste, how desolate it must have been as a living-room in a mansion, such as the Maypole once was. "God help the man whose heart ever changes with the world, as an old mansion when it becomes an inn," Dickens exclaims. [Illustration: THE CHESTER ROOM _Drawn by L. Walker_] The best bedroom to which Mr. Chester repaired for the night after his interview with Mr. Haredale was nearly as large and possessed "a great spectral bedstead, hung with faded brocade, and ornamented, at the top of each carved post, with a plume of feathers that had once been white, but with dust and age had now grown hearse-like and funereal"; but the room, John Willet informed his guest, was "as warm as a toast in a tankard." And so Mr. Chester was left to his rest in the Maypole's ancient bed. These apartments, stately and grand as they were, could not compare or compete in comfort with the bar, the bar parlour and other corners frequented by the more menial coterie of the inn. Even the stables were pleasant in their way, and, when Hugh, the ostler--Maypole Hugh as he was called--was ordered to take Mr. Chester's horse, John Willet assured his guest that "there's good accommodation for man and beast," which was true then and is true to-day. Later came Lord George Gordon, John Grueby and Mr. Gashford on their "No Popery" mission, all looking like "tagrag and bobtail," asking if there are any inns thereabouts. "There are no inns," replied Mr. Willet, with strong emphasis on the plural number; "but there's a inn--one inn--the Maypole Inn. That's a inn indeed. You won't see the like of that inn often." After being assured that his visitors were really the persons they represented themselves to be, John Willet recovered so far as to observe that there was ample accommodation at the Maypole for the party; "good beds, neat wines, excellent entertainment for man and beast; private rooms for large and small parties; dinners dressed upon the shortest notice; choice stabling, and a lock-up coach-house; and, in short, to run over such recommendatory scraps of language as were painted up on various portions of the building, and which in the course of forty years he had learnt to repeat with tolerable correctness." And so they were "put up" for the night, and they could desire nothing better.