Regarded as a bibelot, Mrs. Wigger was, I think, of the first perfection. In her own genre, so to say, she was as finished, as impossible of improvement, as an Elgin marble, a Grecian urn, a bit of Chinese blue and white, a fan of old Japan, a Vermeer, a Whistler symphony, a caricature by Max Beerbohm. She was of massive mould and very individually shapen. Her face was very large and very red and heavily pock-marked. In her bizarre garments, in some indefinable way she imparted to the character of the born slattern something of the Grand Style. Her utterance was quavered in a weird, cracked voice, which had somewhat an effect as of the wind crying high aloft in a ship's rigging. She slipslod about, always a bit unsteadily. Her movements and her manner generally, I felt, made it not unreasonable to suppose that she had in secret certain habits no longer widely approved by society. The apple of her eye was an unkempt parrot which spent its days in vainly attempting to ascend the embracing sides of a tin bathtub. Landladies, beyond all other persons, have the esoteric power of becoming for one the geniuses of places. It would, for instance, be quite impossible for anyone to visualize my Mrs. Cheeseman torn from, as you might say her context. If you were asked to describe Mrs. Cheeseman you would naturally do it in this way: You would say, "Well, I wonder what has become of the sweetest, quaintest, fairest old inn in all England!" And into your mind would come a rapid cinematograph picture: A highway winding out of Dorking, stretching its way between hills to the sea. You round a turn and see before you long, low, glistening white stables--the stables, evidently, of a coaching inn. And presently you come into view of an ancient, white, stone building with a "Sussex roof." From a tall post before the door swings the board of the "King's Head." White ducks ride in a pond at the roadside there. Round this inn which you are approaching is the greenest, handsomest hedge ever seen. And along the road beyond you perceive the cottages of a wee village. "We know that all things work together for good to them that love God." The romance of destiny which in its inscrutable way has been leading you all your long life long to the bosom, if I may so put it, of Mrs. Cheeseman, reveals its beneficence now by carefully graduated steps. At the other side of the main bulk of the "King's Head," which it was given you first to see, you come upon a delicious little flagged yard leading to another arm of the house, older still, very venerable, with a high roof low descending, a roof which tucks under its projecting wing many oddly placed little latticed windows gayly sporting innumerable tiny panes. Like a miniature cathedral spire, a tall, quaint chimney stands sentinel at one corner, and several chimney-pots peep over the roof's dark crown.