"The yard presented none of that bustle and activity which are the usual characteristics of a large coach inn. Three or four lumbering wagons, each with a pile of goods beneath its ample canopy, about the height of the second-floor window of an ordinary house, were stowed away beneath a lofty roof which extended over one end of the yard; and another, which was probably to commence its journey that morning, was drawn out into the open space. A double tier of bedroom galleries, with old, clumsy balustrades, ran round two sides of the straggling area, and a double row of bells to correspond, sheltered from the weather by a little sloping roof, hung over the door. . . . Two or three gigs and chaise-carts were wheeled up under different little sheds and penthouses; and the occasional heavy tread of a carthorse or rattling of a chain at the further end of the yard announced to anybody who cared about the matter that the stable lay in that direction. When we add that a few boys in smock frocks were lying asleep on heavy packages, wool-packs and other articles that were scattered about on heaps of straw, we have described as fully as need be the general appearance of the yard of the White Hart Inn, High Street, Borough, on the particular morning in question." This was the inn, then, to which Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Wardle came in search of the runaway couple, and Sam Weller was the first person they interviewed on the subject. The reader will refer to Chapter X of the book should he want his memory refreshed regarding the amusing scene with Sam, which has been so faithfully pictured by Phiz in one of his illustrations. How they discovered the misguided Rachael, how they bought off the adventurer, Jingle, and how Mr. Pickwick, Wardle and the deserted lady set forth the next day by the Muggleton heavy coach is duly set forth in Dickens's own way. The "White Hart" remained very much as Dickens found it and described it in 1836 until it was finally demolished in 1889. Following the advent of railways it lost a good deal of its glamour, and in its last years the old galleries on two of its sides were let out in tenements, and the presence of the occupants gave a certain animation to the scene. In the large inner yard were some quaint old house which were crowded with lodgers, but it still hung on to its old traditions of the coaching times, and even up to its last days the old inn was the halting-place of the last of the old-fashioned omnibuses which plied between London Bridge and Clapham. Nothing now remains to remind us of the old inn which Dickens and Sam Weller have made immortal in the annals of coaching but a narrow turning bearing its name, where is established a Sam Weller Club. CHAPTER V "LA BELLE SAUVAGE" AND THE "MARQUIS OF GRANBY," DORKING