If you have given him too much, you are
made sensible of your folly by the extra amount of his gratitude, and the
bows with which he salutes you from the doorstep. Generally, you cannot
very decidedly say whether you have been right or wrong; but, in almost
all cases, you decidedly feel that you have been fleeced. Then the
living at the best of English hotels, so far as my travels have brought
me acquainted with them, deserves but moderate praise, and is especially
lacking in variety. Nothing but joints, joints, joints; sometimes,
perhaps, a meat-pie, which, if you eat it, weighs upon your conscience,
with the idea that you have eaten the scraps of other people's dinners.
At the lake hotels, the fare is lamb and mutton and grout,--the latter
not always fresh, and soon tired of. We pay like nabobs, and are
expected to be content with plain mutton.
We spent the day yesterday at Grasmere, in quiet walks about the hotel;
and at a little past six in the afternoon, I took my departure in the
stage-coach for Windermere. The coach was greatly overburdened with
outside passengers,--fifteen in all, besides the four insiders, and one
of the fifteen formed the apex of an immense pile of luggage on the top.
It seems to me miraculous that we did not topple over, the road being so
hilly and uneven, and the driver, I suspect, none the steadier for his
visits to all the tap-rooms along the route from Cockermouth. There was
a tremendous vibration of the coach now and then; and I saw that, in case
of our going over, I should be flung headlong against the high stone
fence that bordered most of the road.
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