308 AN AMERICAX FARMER IX EXGLAND. 



We spent Sunday at Salisbury. We were fortunate in finding 

 a comfortable, quiet, old inn, in which we were the only lodgers. 

 After once getting acquainted with the crooked, elaborate stair- 

 ways and passages, and learning the relative position of our cham- 

 bers and the common rooms, we were as much at home, as quiet, 

 and as able to command whatever we had occasion for, as if we 

 had leased the house, furnished, and manned it. The landlady 

 was our housekeeper, the servants our domestics. We saw no 

 one but them, (till night, when we happened to discover, in a re- 

 mote subterranean corner, a warm, smoky, stone-cavern, in which 

 a soldier, a stage-coachman, and others, were making merry with 

 ladies, beer, and song,) and them we saw only as we chose to. 

 We had a large, comfortable parlor, with dark-colored furniture, 

 of an age in which ease was not sacrificed to decoration ; a dais 

 and bow-window, old prints of Nelson's victories, and Garrick 

 and Siddons in Shakspearian characters, a smouldering sea-coal 

 fire, several country newspapers, and a second-hand last week's 

 Times. Preposterous orders were listened to without a smile, 

 receipts for Yankee dishes distinctly understood in all their elabo- 

 ration without impatience, and to the extent of the resources of 

 the establishment faithfully executed. Only once was the mild 

 business-manner of our hostess disturbed by an appearance of 

 surprise ; when we told her that we were Americans, she raised 

 her eyes in blank incredulity, and asked, " You don't mean you 

 were born in America, sir?" meaning, unquestionably, "how 

 could you be so white?" The servants kept out of sight; our 

 room was " put to rights," our clothes arranged in a bureau, while 

 we were at breakfast ; and when we were seated, and had got 

 fairly under way with an excellent home-like dinner, the girl who 

 acted for waiter, seeming to understand our humor, put a hand- 

 bell on the table and withdrew, saying that we would please to 

 call her when we wanted any thing. 



