"These stables were a melancholy sight to me. They reminded me of my own. Where, in my full stalls, twenty goodly steeds used to feed, little else than a mouse stirs now; and that mouse may be a ghost for all I know, haunting the grave of the last oat eaten a quarter of a century ago. In this long line of disused stabling I paused. There was a thin cat there, deceived to expectation by the long-deserted hole of a rat. A broken broom, covered with very ancient cobwebs, lay under one manger, and the remnants of a stable-bucket under another. Farmers came in and farmers went out occasionally and tied up their horses anywhere; so that all the tumbling-down stalls were dirty, and the whole thing given up to dreary desolation. [Sidenote: _RUSTIC CATERING_] "A musing and a melancholy man, I left the stables, went into the house, and called for dinner and a bed. No smart waiter, with a white napkin twisted round his thumb, came forth to my summons; the few people in the house looked like broken-down farming-men and women, and seemed to be occupied in the selfish discussion of their own tap. "'Yes,' they said, as if astonished by the unwonted desire for such refreshment, 'I _could_ have a bed; and what would I like for dinner?' "Now, that question was very well for them to ask, when they knew its meaning to be very wide; but the real dilemma was, what could they get to set before me? a point on which I at once desired information. 'A fowl.' 'What, ready for dressing?' 'Oh yes, quite.' Spirit of Ude--that King of Cooks (when he chose it)--if you still delight in heat, then grill these people; or when you 'cook their goose,' teach them to know the difference between a fowl hung for a time and picked for the spit, and a poor dear old chuckie, seated at roost in all her feathers, and 'ready' certainly; for her owner has only to clutch her legs and pull her screaming from her perch, to roast or boil, and send her, tough, to table. "Well, up came my hen at last, flanked by some curious compound, dignified by the name of sherry, which I exchanged for some very nearly as bad spirits and water; when, having gone through the manual--not the mastication--of a meal, I walked forth, and mused on the deserted garden and paddock in the rear of all; and in the dusky hue of night fancied that I saw the shadows of galled and broken-kneed posters limping over the grass to graze, as no doubt they had done in former times. In short, dear reader, from this last retrospection, hallucination, or what you will, I regained mine inn, and, calling for a candle, went to bed."