The hospitable country-seat to which I refer is Coolcup House, the
residence of that enterprising gentleman-farmer and respected chairman of
Quarter Sessions, Sir John Giles. Sir John's Bachelor Bedroom has been
wisely fitted up on the ground-floor. It is the one solitary sleeping
apartment in that part of the house. Fidgety bachelors can jump out on
to the lawn, at night, through the bow-window, without troubling anybody
to unlock the front door; and can communicate with the presiding genius
of the cellar by merely crossing the hall. For the rest, the room is
delightfully airy and spacious, and fitted up with all possible luxury.
It started in life, under Sir John's careful auspices, the perfection
of neatness and tidiness. But the bachelors have corrupted it long
since. However carefully the servants may clean, and alter, and arrange
it, the room loses its respectability again, and gets slovenly and
unpresentable the moment their backs are turned. Sir John himself, the
tidiest man in existence, has given up all hope of reforming it. He peeps
in occasionally, and sighs and shakes his head, and puts a chair in its
place, and straightens a print on the wall, and looks about him at the
general litter and confusion, and gives it up and goes out again. He is a
rigid man and a resolute in the matter of order, and has his way all over
the rest of the house--but the Bachelor Bedroom is too much for him.
The first bachelor who inhabited the room when I began to be a guest at
Coolcup House, was Mr. Bigg.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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