The inn, or hotel, at Bethgelert, was a large and commodious building, and was anything but thronged with company; what company, however, there was, was disagreeable enough, perhaps more so than that in which I had been the preceding evening, which was composed of the scum of Manchester and Liverpool; the company amongst which I now was consisted of some seven or eight individuals, two of them were military puppies, one a tallish fellow, who, though evidently upwards of thirty, affected the airs of a languishing girl, and would fain have made people believe that he was dying of ennui and lassitude. The other was a short spuddy fellow, with a broad, ugly face, and with spectacles on his nose, who talked very consequentially about “the service” and all that, but whose tone of voice was coarse, and his manner that of an under-bred person; then there was an old fellow about sixty-five, a civilian, with a red, carbuncled face; he was father of the spuddy military puppy, on whom he occasionally cast eyes of pride and almost adoration, and whose sayings he much applauded, especially certain double entendres, to call them by no harsher term, directed to a fat girl, weighing some fifteen stone, who officiated in the coffee-room as waiter. Then there was a creature to do justice to whose appearance would require the pencil of a Hogarth. He was about five feet three inches and a quarter high, and might have weighed, always provided a stone weight had been attached to him, about half as much as the fat girl. His countenance was cadaverous, and was eternally agitated, by something between a grin and a simper. He was dressed in a style of superfine gentility, and his skeleton fingers were bedizened with tawdry rings. His conversation was chiefly about his bile and his secretions, the efficacy of licorice in producing a certain effect, and the expediency of changing one’s linen at least three times a day; though had he changed his six I should have said that the purification of the last shirt would have been no sinecure to the laundress. His accent was decidedly Scotch: he spoke familiarly of Scott, and one or two other Scotch worthies, and more than once insinuated that he was a member of Parliament. With respect to the rest of the company I say nothing, and for the very sufficient reason that, unlike the above described batch, they did not seem disposed to be impertinent towards me.