When Mr. Pickwick decided to stay, “the landlord smiled his delight” and issued orders to the waiter. “Lights in the Sun, John; make up the fire; the gentlemen are wet!” he cried anxiously, although, doubtless, if the gentlemen had gone forward they might have been drowned, for all he cared. And so the scene changed from the rain-washed road to a cosy room, with a waiter laying the cloth for dinner, a cheerful fire burning, and the tables lit with wax candles. “Everything looked (as everything always does in all decent English inns) as if the travellers had been expected, and their comforts prepared for days beforehand.” Upon this charming picture of ease at one’s inn descended the atrabilious rival editors of _The Eatanswill Gazette_ and _The Eatanswill Independent_, the organs respectively of “blue” and “buff” shades of political opinion. Pott of the _Gazette_, and Slurk of the _Independent_ each found his rival sheet lying on the tables of the inn; but what either of those editors or those newspapers were doing here in Northamptonshire (Eatanswill being a far-distant East Anglian town, by general consensus of opinion identified with Ipswich) is one of those occasional lapses from consistency that in _Pickwick_ give the modern commentator and annotator food for speculation. When the inn was closed for the night Slurk retired to the kitchen to drink his rum and water by the fire, and to enjoy the bitter-sweet luxury of sneering at the rival print; but, as it happened, Mr. Pickwick’s party, accompanied by Pott, also adjourned to the kitchen to smoke a cigar or so before bed. How ancient, by the way, seems that custom! Does any guest, anywhere, in these times of smoking-rooms, withdraw to the kitchen to smoke his cigar, pipe, or cigarette? How the rival editors--the “unmitigated viper” and the “ungrammatical twaddler”--met and presently came from oblique taunts to direct abuse of one another, and thence to a fight, let the pages of _The Pickwick Papers_ tell. For my part, I refuse to believe that there were ever such journalists. [Illustration: “OSBORNE’S HOTEL, ADELPHI.”] What was once the kitchen of the “Saracen’s Head” is now the bar-parlour of the “Pomfret Arms”; but otherwise the house is the same as when Dickens knew it. The somewhat severe frontage loses in a black-and-white drawing its principal charm, for it is built of the golden-brown local ferruginous sandstone of the district. The journey to London is carried abruptly from Towcester to its ending at the “George and Vulture”; and with “Osborne’s Hotel in the Adelphi” the last inn to be identified in the closing scenes of _Pickwick_ is reached. That staid family hotel, still existing in John Street, and now known as the “Adelphi,” is associated with the flight of Emily Wardle and Snodgrass. The sign of the last public-house in the story, “an excellent house near Shooter’s Hill,” to which Mr. Tony Weller, no longer “of the Bell Savage,” retired, is not disclosed.