I may here mention the singular parallel in Besant and Rice’s novel, _The Seamy Side_, where, in Chapter XXVIII., you will find Gilbert Yorke going to the hotel at Lulworth, in Dorset, and there ordering, like another Will Waterproof, “for the good of the house,” “a pint of port” after dinner. He, we are told, could not drink “the ardent port of country inns,” and therefore “he poured the contents of the bottle into a pot of mignonette in the window.... The flowers waggled their heads sadly and then drooped and died,” as of course, being notoriously total abstainers, they could not choose but do. But it was unfair, alike to the port and the plants. [Illustration: THE “GREAT WHITE HORSE,” IPSWICH.] How changed the times since those when Mr. Pickwick stayed at the “Great White Horse!” We read how, after his unpleasant adventure with the lady in the yellow curl-papers, he “stood alone, in an open passage, in the middle of the night, half dressed,” and in perfect darkness, with the uncomfortable knowledge that, if he tried to find his own bedroom by turning the handles of each one in succession “he stood every chance of being shot at, and perhaps killed, by some wakeful traveller.” No one in a similar position would have that fear now: and even American guests, commonly supposed to “go heeled,” _i.e._ to carry an armoury of six-shooters about them, do not invariably sleep with their shooting-irons under their pillows. The exterior of the “Great White Horse” is much the same as when Dickens saw it, “in the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the way.” Still over the pillared portico trots the effigy of the Great White Horse himself, “a stone statue of some rampacious animal, with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse”; but the old courtyard has in modern times been roofed in with glass, and is now a something partaking in equal parts of winter-garden, smoking-lounge, and bar. Returning again to London from Ipswich, Mr. Pickwick, giving up his lodgings in Goswell Road with the treacherous Mrs. Bardell, took up his abode in “very good old-fashioned and comfortable quarters, to wit, the ‘George and Vulture’ Tavern and Hotel, George Yard, Lombard Street.”