There were no chops that night for supper, nor chickens; and they fed, with what grace they could summon up, on a “small leg of starved mutton and a duck,” which, by the scent of them, had been cooked a fortnight. For sauce they had hunger only. “Our bedrooms,” says Wigstead, “were most miserable indeed: the rain poured in at every tile in the ceiling,” and the sheets were literally wringing wet; so that, in Wigstead’s elegant phrasing, they “thought it most prudent to sacrifice to _Somnus_ in our own garments, between blankets”: which may perhaps be translated, into everyday English, to mean that they slept in their own clothes. They saw strange sights on that wild tour, and, in the course of their hazardous travels through the then scarcely civilised interior of the Principality, came to the “pleasant village” of Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, where they found a “decent inn” in whose kitchen they remarked a dog acting as turnspit. That the dogs so employed did not particularly relish the work is evident in Wigstead’s remark: “Great care must be taken that this animal does not observe the cook approach the larder. If he does, he immediately hides himself for the remainder of the day,” acting, in fact, like a professional “unemployed” when offered a job! A familiar sight in the kitchen of any considerable inn of the long ago was the turnspit dog, who, like the caged mouse or squirrel with his recreation-wheel, revolved a kind of treadwheel which, in this instance, was connected with apparatus for turning the joints roasting at the fire, and formed not so much recreation as extremely hard work. The dogs commonly used for this purpose were of the long-bodied, short-legged, Dachshund type. Machinery, in the form of bottle-jacks revolved by clockwork, came to the relief of those hard-working dogs so long ago that all knowledge of turnspits, except such as may be gleaned from books of reference, is now lost, and illustrations of them performing their duties are exceedingly rare. Rowlandson’s spirited drawing is, on that account, doubly welcome. [Illustration: THE KITCHEN OF A COUNTRY INN, 1797: SHOWING THE TURNSPIT DOG. _From the engraving after Rowlandson._]