No traveller bids farewell to Old Windsor without paying his respects to one of the best of the riverside taverns, the time-honoured "Bells of Ouseley." Perfectly free, at present, from modern revivalism, and from all manner of conscious style, is this genuine old inn, separated by the high road from the river bank. Its quaint bow-windows, one on either side of a porch entered by way of a steep flight of steps--the wholesome dread of unsteady topers--are just of the period and fashion to captivate an artist in search of the picturesque; nor can we look on this unspoilt hostelry without thinking of Mr. Leslie, Mr. Boughton, or Mr. Tissot. In France, a village cabaret or auberge, humbler than this, would yet be far more advanced in the art of public entertainment. "They cook very well at these places," is a remark you frequently hear in Normandy, Picardy, or Champagne, from the lips of culinary judges, versed in all the intricacies of Parisian gastronomy; and if the unpretending inn be near a trout-stream, be sure you may have a dish fit for a prince, and within the means of a woodcutter. Were some enterprising cook to lease a cosy tavern like the "Bells of Ouseley," and introduce a really high-class _cuisine_ on a choice but simple scale, the place would be talked about in a month and spoiled in a year, at the end of which time the proprietor might be either a rich man or a bankrupt. Let us take our pretty, rustic riverside resort, for rest and refreshment, as we find it. Fine cookery would drive out honest companions whom old Izaak--who had a face like an elderly pike, but was a right good fellow for all that--would have drawn into profitable talk; for at the "Bells of Ouseley" you meet anglers and bargemen from whom much is to be learnt, if you go the right way to get hold of them. On the left as you enter is the tap, often crowded; on the right a bar-parlour, in which the company is more select. Of old the "Bells" had the reputation of being a house of call for "minions of the moon," as Falstaff called them, or "knights of the road," to choose a later phrase, such as the authors of "Paul Clifford" and "Rookwood" would have applied to the same order of gentry. But the landlord does not, in these days, give stall and fodder to nags of suspicious character, like bonny Black Bess. The old stone stable is oftener occupied by steeds that consume neither oats nor hay; and the highwaymen are not such as wear crape over their faces, or carry pistols like demi-culverins, or dance minuets with ladies they have plundered, but are in fact only members of a bicycle club. Under that old roof with its odd chimneys, standing against a background of greenery, there are jolly ghosts, you may be sure; for the grimmer goblins that have haunted the "Bells" in time when gibbets were plentiful, and when every one of these evil trees bore its rotting fruit, that swung and creaked in the night-wind, were laid long ago in