The _Blue Boar_, whither Mr. Charles Lovely was bound, was a hostelry of the conventionally ample type. The rooms with exterior rows of galleries were built round a large quadrangle to which coaches and stage waggons were admitted through an arch that was only just high enough for the vehicles of a more recent pattern. The fixed population consisted of innumerable plump and shapely chambermaids, innumerable dried-up hostlers and grooms, and a certain number of sedate waiters who were all clothed in the same shade of rusty black, and all of whom wished they had settled earlier in life to become footmen. However this canker of thwarted ambition never prevented them from handling anything from a soup-tureen to a guinea-piece with reverence and precision. The host, Jeremy Daish, was neither round nor rubicund. On the contrary he was remarkably sallow and, in his suit of cinnamon cloth, bore a vague likeness to a well-seasoned Cremona violin. He was the builder, owner, and inventor of the famous _Daish's Rooms_ adjoining the Inn and, as the latter served for a recognized adjunct to the more official _Assembly Rooms_, Mr. Daish became a somewhat mildewed counterpart of the great Beau himself, a mezzotint ill-executed of a famous painting in oils. His back was so often crouched in servility that it had acquired a permanent stoop. Rumour said that years ago Mr. Daish was often seen fiddle in hand at West-country fairs and wakes, and supported the legend by pointing out when a lady of the extremist fashion and quality graced his dancing floor with a pair of very high red heels, the solemn innkeeper would steal to the Dais of the musicians and, taking an instrument, would himself bob and play my lady through a minuet with considerable Gusto and Bravura. The _Blue Boar_ was patronized by a select company of fashionable young gentlemen who lent the old hostelry something of the tone of White's or Almack's. Bagmen were excluded from the wing occupied by these elegant patrons, and though from time to time one of the former, with a merry reputation, would be invited to take wine with the quality in return for the tale of a famous and gross adventure, it was distinctly understood that nothing low or vulgar was allowed to penetrate beyond a certain doorway. Beau Ripple himself would saunter down towards twilight and exhort his youthful subjects on the folly of vice, the futility of play and the obligation to drink the waters at half-past eight o'clock. Mr. Ripple was esteemed a Puritan, but such a genteel Puritan that the young gentlemen, subdued by the length of his waistcoats and his irreproachable ties and solitaires, listened to him willingly enough, and overpowered by the orthodoxy of his wigs and buckles, the fullness of his shirts and the size of his cuffs, heeded his warnings sometimes.