I
bored myself to death with an old volume of the Lady's Magazine. I
read all the commonplaced names of ambitious travellers scrawled on
the panes of glass; the eternal families of the Smiths, and the
Browns, and the Jacksons, and the Johnsons, and all the other sons;
and I deciphered several scraps of fatiguing inn-window poetry which I
have met with in all parts of the world.
The day continued lowering and gloomy; the slovenly, ragged, spongy
clouds drifted heavily along; there was no variety even in the rain:
it was one dull, continued, monotonous patter--patter--patter,
excepting that now and then I was enlivened by the idea of a brisk
shower, from the rattling of the drops upon a passing umbrella.
It was quite _refreshing_ (if I may be allowed a hackneyed phrase of
the day) when, in the course of the morning, a horn blew, and a
stage-coach whirled through the street, with outside passengers stuck
all over it, cowering under cotton umbrellas, and seethed together,
and reeking with the steams of wet box-coats and upper Benjamins.
The sound brought out from their lurking-places a crew of vagabond
boys, and vagabond dogs, and the carroty-headed hostler, and that
nondescript animal ycleped Boots, and all the other vagabond race that
infest the purlieus of an inn; but the bustle was transient; the coach
again whirled on its way; and boy and dog, and hostler and Boots, all
slunk back again to their holes; the street again became silent, and
the rain continued to rain on.
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