_The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices_, a light-hearted account of a tour taken by Dickens and Wilkie Collins in 1857, begins with the travellers being set down by the express at Carlisle, and ends, after many wanderings in Cumberland and Lancashire, at Doncaster. It is largely an account of inns, including the “Queen’s Head,” Hesket Newmarket, in Cumberland, now a private house; and the “King’s Arms,” Market Street, Lancaster, pulled down in 1880. The “King’s Arms” was, from the exterior, commonplace personified, but within doors you were surrounded by ancient oaken staircases, mahogany panelling, and, according to Dickens, mystic old servitors in black; and doubtless were so encompassed with mysteries and forebodings that when you retired to rest--not being able in such a house to merely “go to bed”--in one of the catafalque-like four-posters, you immediately leapt between the sheets and drew the clothes over your head, in fear of ghosts; dreaming uncomfortably that you were dead and lying in state, and waking with a terrific start in the morning, at the coming of the hot water and the tap at the door, with the dreadful impression that the Day of Judgment was come and you summoned to account before the Most High. These being the most remarkable features of the “King’s Arms” at Lancaster, it is perhaps not altogether strange that the house was at length demolished and replaced by an uninteresting modern hotel, with no associations--and no ghosts. [Illustration: THE “LION,” SHREWSBURY, SHOWING THE ANNEXE ADJOINING, WHERE DICKENS STAYED.] A weird story was told of the old inn, by which it seems that a young bride was poisoned there, in a room pointed out as the “Bride’s Chamber,” the criminal being duly hanged at Lancaster gaol. In memory of this traditional romance, it was the custom to serve the incoming guests with a piece of bride-cake. They might also, if they liked, sleep in the very identical ancient black oak four-poster, in the room where the tragedy took place; but, although there was sufficient eagerness to see it in daylight, no very great competition was ever observed among guests for the honour of occupying--we will not say sleeping in--that tragical couch. Dickens himself, however, lay in it, and seems to have slept sufficiently well; greatly, we may suppose, to his disappointment.