Notwithstanding all this, I am not an obstructive man; I am not a “fogey.” I take the good the gods provide me. I have no prejudices against gas; though I wish it could be supplied without so much parochial quarrelling. It may generate poison, as certain chemists assert; but it certainly generates too many pamphlets and public meetings. I use the electric telegraph; I travel by the railway; and I am thankful to their inventors and originators. The moment, however, I leave the railway, I plunge rapidly into the past. I never linger, for a moment, at the bright, new, damp, lofty railway hotel (I hate the name of hotel, although I know it springs from hostelry); nor amongst the mushroom houses that rally round the station. My course is always through the distant trees, beyond the dwarfish, crumbling church, whose broad low windows seem to have taken root amongst the flat, uneven tombstones, into the old town or village, into its very heart—its market-place—and up to the brown old door of its oldest inn. I know everything that can be said against such places. They are very yellow; they have too strong a flavour of stale tobacco-smoke; their roofs are low, and their floors have a leaning either to one side or the other. Their passages are dark, and often built on various levels; so that you may tumble down into your bed-chamber, or tumble up into your sitting-room, shaking every tooth in your head, or possibly biting your tongue. These may be serious drawbacks to some people, but they are not so serious to me, and I am able to find many compensating advantages. The last vestige of the real old able-bodied port lingers only in such nooks and corners, and is served out by matronly servants, like housekeepers in ancient families. I know one inn of the kind where the very “boots” looks positively venerable. He wears a velvet skull-cap that Cardinal Wolsey might have been proud of; he has saved ten thousand pounds in his humble servitude, and is a large landed proprietor in the county. Prosperity has not made him inattentive. No one will give your shoes such an enduring polish, or call you up for an early train with such unerring punctuality.