122 AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



jack, and before it on the table was a strongly-bound book, 

 which proved to be &quot; The Record of the Boot Inn Birthday 

 Club.&quot; The bond entered into by each member on entering 

 this association was, that he should treat the club to plenty 

 of good malt liquor on his every future birthday. There was 

 a constitution and many by-laws, the penalty for breaking 

 which was always to be paid in &quot; beer for the club.&quot; 



At other inns we would be shown, by delightfully steep, 

 narrow, crooked, and every way possible inconvenient stair 

 ways, up through low, dark spaces of inclined plane, into 

 long, steep-roofed, pigeon-house-like rooms, having an air as 

 gloomy and mysterious as it was hot and close. Then, upon 

 our declining to avail ourselves of such romantic and typhous 

 accommodations, instead of being reconducted down by the 

 tortuous path of our ascent, we would be shown, through a 

 back door in the third story, out upon a passage that seemed 

 to be also used as a public street (footway), doors opening 

 from it which were evidently entrances to residences in the 

 rear. 



Finally we were suited ; and now I am writing on an old 

 oak table, with spiral legs, sitting in an old oak chair, with an 

 Elizabethan carved back, my feet on an old oak floor (rather 

 wavy), stout old oak beams over my head, and low walls of 

 old oak wainscot all around me. Resting on an old oak bench 

 by the window, is a young man with a broad-brimmed felt 

 hat slouched half over his face. Across the street, so near 

 we might jump into it if we were attacked from the rear, 

 is a house with the most grotesquely-carved and acutely- 

 pointed gable possible to be believed real, and not a paste 

 board scene, with the date &quot;1539&quot; cut in awkward figures 

 over the cockloft window, high in the apex. For fifteen min 

 utes there has been a regular &quot;clink, clink&quot; deadening all 

 other sounds but the clash of sabres against spurs, and distant 



