The landlady has now risen to the dignity of diamond rings, and the dining-room to that of separate round tables, menus, serviettes and a depressed and dingy waiter. Lager-beer, and something vinegary of the claret order afford an indifferent choice, and if the house still possesses a pewter tankard, it probably is cherished on some shelf as a curious relic of savage times. The house professes to supply luncheons at three shillings, but sweets and “attendance” are “extras.” CHAPTER XII INGLE-NOOKS The chimney-corners of the old rustic inns, in which the gossips lingered late on bitter winter nights, have ever formed an attraction for writers of the historic novel. There is no more romantic opening possible than that of the village inn, with the spiced ale warming on the hearth, and the rustics toasting their toes in the ingle-nook, what time the wind howls without, roars in the trees, like the roaring of an angry sea, and takes hold of the casements and shakes and rattles them, as though some outcast, denied admittance, would yet force his way into the warmth and comfort, out of the cheerless night. The warring elements, and the gush of wind and driven snow following the opening of the door and the entrance from time to time of other recruits for the ingle-nook, would make that cosy corner seem, if possible, only the more desirable. [Illustration: THE INGLE-NOOK, “WHITE HORSE” INN, SHERE.] In fact, there is no more sure way of engrossing a reader from the very first page than that of beginning on this note. He feels that something melodramatic is in the wind, and pokes the fire, snuggles up in his arm-chair, and prepares to be thrilled. The thrill is generally not long in coming, for there was never--or, well, hardly ever--any romantic novel where an ingle-nook occurs in which we do not presently find the advent of the inscrutable and taciturn stranger who, after calling, “Ho! landlord, a tankard of your best,” relapses into a bodeful and gloomy silence, and piques the curiosity, and at the same time chills the marrow, of the assembled company, and may turn out to be anything you please, according to the period, from a king in disguise to a burglar on his way to crack some lonely crib.