even of a Dutchman in the grocery business; and at least there was the certificate of the pilgrim's visit to Jerusalem to be received—and paid for. [Illustration: ARMS OF A JERUSALEM PILGRIM] And now the tourist's last and longest journey has been told; he is at home safe, leaving us with nothing fresh to tell except the incidentals of his journeyings, and leaving us, one tourist, at least, with his blessing: "In the meantime I leave thee, gentle reader, travelling towards the heavenly Jerusalem, where God grant at length we may all arrive, Jesus Christ being our pilot and Janizary to conduct us thereunto." CHAPTER VI INNS _Servus._ ... Però con licentia, quando quierese ir vuessa merced? Sed bona venia, quando vult recedere T. D.? _Viator._ Mañana, plaziendo à Dios, en caso que pueda madrugar Cras, si Deo placet, si possim diluculo surgere. _Servus._ Paraque no se queda aqui aun algunos dias? Quare non manet hic adhuc per aliquot dies? _Viator._ El huesped y el pesce en tres dias hiede Hospes et piscis post triduum foetent. Müller, "Linguæ Hispanicæ Institutio," 1630. It is a most unsatisfactory thing—reading about what you would like to see; but if seeing sixteenth-century Europe implied spending the nights in sixteenth-century inns there is much to be said for preferring the experience in print only. Luxury of a kind certainly was to be had. At the "Vasa d'Oro" at Rome were gorgeous beds, hung with silk and cloth of gold, worth four to five hundred crowns each; at the "Ecu" at Châlons silken bedding, too; and Germany occasionally provided sheets trimmed with lace four-fingers'-breadth wide in panelled rooms, while by 1652 Amsterdam possessed a hotel reckoned the best in Europe, every room in which was floored with black and white marble and hung with pictures, with one room containing an organ and decorated with gilded leather in place of tapestries. But these superfluities did not imply that a comfortable medium was easily found. In any case, accommodation divided itself into bedroom and dining-room; of anything approaching a sitting-room there is rarely a word. The chief exception to this is the five or six halls, decorated and furnished like those of a rich gentleman, at the inn outside Sinigaglia. This was the finest hotel in Italy when built, shortly before 1578, by the Duke of Urbino, who allowed no other there. Its forty bedrooms, with no more than two beds in each, all opened on to one long gallery by separate doors.[93]