Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill It was an Inn after the pattern of many such, whose exact date it is difficult to assign; with wrinkled, weather darkened roof of red tiles, yellow washed front, old fashioned windows hung within with spotlessly white curtains, rustic porch with kindly, considerate seats on either hand, and over which clambered autumn flowering honeysuckle and the second blooms of a Souvenir de Malmaison rose. It wore an air of tranquil but cordial hospitality, and peaceful cleanliness. Gazing on it, as you moored your boat to its informal landing stage, you felt sure you would find a smiling face within its Bar, a doing, Martha minded housewife in the parlour, a hearty, omniscient landlord somewhere in its precincts, and scrupulously clean bed rooms with comfortable pillows, and muslin, lavender lined bags in their chests of drawers. Your sitting room, if you required one, which we did, would be of like character; convenient, unassuming, made and furnished for daily wants and service, free from ostentation, with a wall paper open perhaps to fastidious criticism, but neither affected nor offensive, and broken here and there by a plain framed print either of sentimental or of sporting character. Its weak point would be its writing materials, since the bulk of its successive occupants for many generations looked on lengthened compositions as an incomprehensible waste of summer and autumn days. Its garden would be at the back, abounding in rows of marrowfat peas, runner beans, gooseberry bushes, with ' Early Prolific,' and late 'Victoria' plum trees, but not wanting withal in rosemary, and thyme, and maiden's blush roses, with here and there a hollyhock and dahlia, and somewhere, be quite sure, a foliage roofed arbour for the abetting and concealment of affectionate discourse. All these th...
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