That chapter, telling of the extraordinary adventure Mr. Pickwick
experienced with the middle-aged lady in the double-bedded room,
is one of the most amusing in the book, and one which has made the
"Great White Horse" as familiar a name as any in fiction or reality.

There are few inns in the novelist's books described so fully. He
must have known it well; indeed, he is supposed to have stayed there
when, in his early days, he visited Ipswich to report an election
for The Morning Chronicle; and probably a similar mistake happened
to him to that which Mr. Pickwick experienced. So when he says,
"The 'Great Horse' is famous in the neighbourhood, in the same
degree as a prize ox, or county paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy
pig--for its enormous size," he evidently was recalling an impression
of those days.

[illustration: The White Horse Hotel, Ipswich. Drawn by L. Walker]

It is an imposing structure viewed from without, with stuccoed
walls, and a pillared entrance, over which stands the sign which so
attracted the novelist's attention. The inside is spacious, with
still the air of the old days about it, and contains fifty bedrooms
and handsome suites of rooms; but Dickens was a little misleading
regarding its size and a little unkind in his reproaches. At any
rate, if the seemingly unkind things he said of it were deserved in
those days of which he writes, they are no longer.

"Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages," he says;
"such clusters of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers
of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof,
as are collected together between the four walls of the Great