Spargo, after losing himself in various corridors and passages, finally landed in the wide, stone-paved hall of the old hotel, and with a sure instinct turned into the bar-parlour which he had noticed when he entered the place. This was a roomy, comfortable, bow-windowed apartment, looking out upon the High Street, and was furnished and ornamented with the usual appurtenances of country-town hotels. There were old chairs and tables and sideboards and cupboards, which had certainly been made a century before, and seemed likely to endure for a century or two longer; there were old prints of the road and the chase, and an old oil-painting or two of red-faced gentlemen in pink coats; there were foxes’ masks on the wall, and a monster pike in a glass case on a side-table; there were ancient candlesticks on the mantelpiece and an antique snuff-box set between them. Also there was a small, old-fashioned bar in a corner of the room, and a new-fashioned young woman seated behind it, who was yawning over a piece of fancy needlework, and looked at Spargo when he entered as Andromeda may have looked at Perseus when he made arrival at her rock. And Spargo, treating himself to a suitable drink and choosing a cigar to accompany it, noted the look, and dropped into the nearest chair. “This,” he remarked, eyeing the damsel with enquiry, “appears to me to be a very quiet place.” “Quiet!” exclaimed the lady. “Quiet?” “That,” continued Spargo, “is precisely what I observed. Quiet. I see that you agree with me. You expressed your agreement with two shades of emphasis, the surprised and the scornful. We may conclude, thus far, that the place is undoubtedly quiet.” The damsel looked at Spargo as if she considered him in the light of a new specimen, and picking up her needlework she quitted the bar and coming out into the room took a chair near his own. “It makes you thankful to see a funeral go by here,” she remarked. “It’s about all that one ever does see.” “Are there many?” asked Spargo. “Do the inhabitants die much of inanition?” The damsel gave Spargo another critical inspection. “Oh, you’re joking!” she said. “It’s well you can. Nothing ever happens here. This place is a back number.” “Even the back numbers make pleasant reading at times,” murmured Spargo. “And the backwaters of life are refreshing. Nothing doing in this town, then?” he added in a louder voice. “Nothing!” replied his companion. “It’s fast asleep. I came here from Birmingham, and I didn’t know what I was coming to. In Birmingham you see as many people in ten minutes as you see here in ten months.” “Ah!” said Spargo. “What you are suffering from is dulness. You must have an antidote.”