146 THE TROUT ARE RISING 
to make—a point of remembering and paying at 
the bar on the way to the smoking room. But it 
is possible to forget, not wilfully, but literally. 
The cynic, who “ knows human nature,” may say 
it was just a dodge to get customers into the bar, 
to spend more money. But it wasn’t. There 
was no sort of incitement, subtle or otherwise, to 
such indulgence. The landlord was a prosperous 
man, busy, and with a large trust in his fellows. 
Told one day that guests must surely sometimes 
forget to square up with the slate (not that one 
existed), and thus not pay for these casual items 
of refreshment at meals, all he said was: “ Well, 
in that case it does them more harm than me.” 
One can imagine what the manager of a London 
cash-down stores would say! Anyhow, there it 
was. It was very nice, too, to get a Christmas 
card from that good landlord, though well over 
half a year since the guest’s departure—time 
enough, one would have thought, for passing 
strangers to have been long forgotten. 
Landlords and landladies have much scope 
for observing human nature. Their guests, 
with their comings and goings, fads and foibles, 
must be to them a constant series of studies in 
personality. One shrewd landlady in the north- 
west of England said she could sum up the guests 
at her hotel by the very way they entered. She 
was still not pleased with those patrons who, when 
the war was on, would come in and immediately 
ask for the porter, “at a time when,” as she re- 
called, “every fit man was away at the war, and 
