are empty it is no more than nine. We ring the bell and order brandy and water before we go to bed. We hold up the bottle to the light. It is the light of candles, not gas; no nasty, new-fangled gas is allowed in this old inn; and, indeed, those who have once used wax candles can never desire any better or softer light. [Illustration: PRINCE ALBERT, AGE 4] In the bedroom the furniture is simple. There is a vast four-poster, with its heavy furniture and valance and curtains. The bed is provided with feather mattresses, deep and soft and sinking, and pillows as deep. There is a washhand-stand, there are two chairs, there is a dressing-table with a looking-glass, there is a chest of drawers. There is nothing else--not a writing-table, not an easy chair; a bedroom is a place, if you please, to sleep in, not to sit in or to work in. If a guest wants to work, let him have a private room and pay for it, unless he can write in the public room. [Illustration: LORD BROUGHAM SIR ROWLAND HILL LORD PALMERSTON LORD BEACONSFIELD RICHARD COBDEN W. E. GLADSTONE LORD SALISBURY REPRESENTATIVE STATESMEN OF THE REIGN] If a bottle of port was considered a sufficient allowance of drink for a moderate man, what was it for a toper? The amount of drinking in these country inns was, in fact, incredible. Men who were considered quite temperate, as a rule, would sit drinking at a public dinner half the night through. They drank, not weak potations of whisky and Apollinaris, but strong fiery port, which they liked, as Tennyson is reported to have liked it, strong and black and sweet. Not for such drinkers as these did mine host produce his best and rarest; a more common and a ranker liquid did for them. The public dinner was rare. There was generally in the bar-parlour, however, the town toper. He was a man whose father had amassed money in trade and left his son a small fortune, enough to keep him in idleness. The small fortune proved, as usual, a danger and a pitfall; idleness led to temptation, temptation led him to the bar-parlour. We may see him sitting in the wooden armchair, where he spends all his evenings. He is close upon fifty--the toper’s limit. A tumbler of rum and water is on the table beside him. He is silent, for very good reasons. He smiles upon the company to show how sober he is. He has been drinking all day long, and is now quite full and quite drunk; yet at ten o’clock he will get up and walk home by himself without so much as a reel or a lurch. He presents to the world when he goes out into it a nose of a kind that you cannot find now, a red, even a purple nose, largely swollen, covered with red blotches; it is a nose enlarged and painted by rum. [Illustration: PRINCE CONSORT IN ROYAL ROBES]