There was an Inn in the cathedral town where I went to school, which had pleasanter recollections about it than any of these.I took it next.It was the Inn where friends used to put up, and where we used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and be tipped.It had an ecclesiastical sign,--the Mitre,--and a bar that seemed to be the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug.I loved the landlord's youngest daughter to distraction,--but let that pass.It was in this Inn that I wascried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight.And though she had been, that Holly-Tree night, for many a long year where all tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.
"To be continued to-morrow," said I, when I took my candle to go to bed.But my bed took it upon itself to continue the train of thought that night.It carried me away, like the enchanted carpet, to a distant place (though still in England), and there, alighting from a stage-coach at another Inn in the snow, as I had actually done some years before, I repeated in my sleep a curious experience I had really had there.More than a year before I made the journey in the course of which I put up at that Inn, I had lost a very near and dear friend by death.Every night since, at home or away from home, I had dreamed of that friend; sometimes as still living; sometimes as returning from the world of shadows to comfort me; always as being beautiful, placid, and happy, never in association with any approach to fear or distress.It was at a lonely Inn in a wide moorland place, that I halted to pass the night.When I had looked from my bedroom window over the waste of snow on which the moon was shining, I sat down by my fire to write a letter.I had always, until that hour, kept it within my own breast that I dreamed every night of the dear lost one.But in the letter that I wrote I recorded the circumstance, and added that I felt much interested in proving whether the subject of my dream would still be faithful to me, travel-tired, and in that remote place.No.I lost the beloved figure of my vision in parting with the secret.My sleep has never looked upon it since, in sixteen years, but once.I was in Italy, and awoke (or seemed to awake), the well- remembered voice distinctly in my ears, conversing with it.I entreated it, as it rose above my bed and soared up to the vaulted roof of the old room, to answer me a question I had asked touching the Future Life.My hands were still outstretched towards it as it vanished, when I heard a bell ringing by the garden wall, and a voice in the deep stillness of the night calling on all good Christians to pray for the souls of the dead; it being All Souls' Eve.
To return to the Holly-Tree.When I awoke next day, it was freezinghard, and the lowering sky threatened more snow.My breakfast cleared away, I drew my chair into its former place, and, with the fire getting so much the better of the landscape that I sat in twilight, resumed my Inn remembrances.
That was a good Inn down in Wiltshire where I put up once, in the days of the hard Wiltshire ale, and before all beer was bitterness.It was on the skirts of Salisbury Plain, and the midnight wind that rattled my lattice window came moaning at me from Stonehenge.There was a hanger-on at that establishment (a supernaturally preserved Druid I believe him to have been, and to be still), with long white hair, and a flinty blue eye always looking afar off; who claimed to have been a shepherd, and who seemed to be ever watching for the reappearance, on the verge of the horizon, of some ghostly flock of sheep that had been mutton for many ages.He was a man with a weird belief in him that no one could count the stones of Stonehenge twice, and make the same number of them; likewise, that any one who counted them three times nine times, and then stood in the centre and said, "I dare!" would behold a tremendous apparition, and be stricken dead.He pretended to have seen a bustard (I suspect him to have been familiar with the dodo), in manner following: He was out upon the plain at the close of a late autumn day, when he dimly discerned, going on before him at a curious fitfully bounding pace, what he at first supposed to be a gig-umbrella that had been blown from some conveyance, but what he presently believed to be a lean dwarf man upon a little pony.Having followed this object for some distance without gaining on it, and having called to it many times without receiving any answer, he pursued it for miles and miles, when, at length coming up with it, he discovered it to be the last bustard in Great Britain, degenerated into a wingless state, and running along the ground.Resolved to capture him or perish in the attempt, he closed with the bustard; but the bustard, who had formed a counter-resolution that he should do neither, threw him, stunned him, and was last seen making off due west.This weird main, at that stage of metempsychosis, may have been a sleep-walker or an enthusiast or a robber; but I awoke one night to find him in the dark at mybedside, repeating the Athanasian Creed in a terrific voice.I paid my bill next day, and retired from the county with all possible precipitation.
