



Produced by Donald Lainson





LITTLE TRAVELS AND ROADSIDE SKETCHES


By William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA Titmarsh)




I. FROM RICHMOND IN SURREY TO BRUSSELS IN BELGIUM

II. GHENT--BRUGES:--

Ghent (1840)

Bruges

III. WATERLOO




LITTLE TRAVELS AND ROADSIDE SKETCHES




I.--FROM RICHMOND IN SURREY TO BRUSSELS IN BELGIUM


... I quitted the "Rose Cottage Hotel" at Richmond, one of the
comfortablest, quietest, cheapest, neatest little inns in England, and
a thousand times preferable, in my opinion, to the "Star and Garter,"
whither, if you go alone, a sneering waiter, with his hair curled,
frightens you off the premises; and where, if you are bold enough to
brave the sneering waiter, you have to pay ten shillings for a bottle
of claret; and whence, if you look out of the window, you gaze on a view
which is so rich that it seems to knock you down with its splendor--a
view that has its hair curled like the swaggering waiter: I say, I
quitted the "Rose Cottage Hotel" with deep regret, believing that I
should see nothing so pleasant as its gardens, and its veal cutlets, and
its dear little bowling-green, elsewhere. But the time comes when people
must go out of town, and so I got on the top of the omnibus, and the
carpet-bag was put inside.


If I were a great prince and rode outside of coaches (as I should if I
were a great prince), I would, whether I smoked or not, have a case of
the best Havanas in my pocket--not for my own smoking, but to give them
to the snobs on the coach, who smoke the vilest cheroots. They poison
the air with the odor of their filthy weeds. A man at all easy in his
circumstances would spare himself much annoyance by taking the above
simple precaution.

A gentleman sitting behind me tapped me on the back and asked for a
light. He was a footman, or rather valet. He had no livery, but the
three friends who accompanied him were tall men in pepper-and-salt
undress jackets with a duke's coronet on their buttons.

After tapping me on the back, and when he had finished his cheroot,
the gentleman produced another wind-instrument, which he called a
"kinopium," a sort of trumpet, on which he showed a great inclination
to play. He began puffing out of the "kinopium" a most abominable
air, which he said was the "Duke's March." It was played by particular
request of one of the pepper-and-salt gentry.

The noise was so abominable that even the coachman objected (although
my friend's brother footmen were ravished with it), and said that it
was not allowed to play toons on HIS 'bus. "Very well," said the valet,
"WE'RE ONLY OF THE DUKE OF B----'S ESTABLISHMENT, THAT'S ALL." The
coachman could not resist that appeal to his fashionable feelings. The
