of the "White Horse's" landings .and stairs again too much for him,
until he was discovered, crouching in a recess in the wall, by his
faithful servant Sam, who conducted him to his right room. Here Mr.
Pickwick made a wise resolve that if he were to stop in the "Great
White Horse" for six months, he. would never trust himself about in
it alone again.

We do not suppose that the visitor would encounter the same
difficulty to-day in getting about the house as did Mr. Pickwick;
but torturous passages are there all the same; and by virtue of
Mr. Pickwick's experiences they are perhaps more noticeable than
would otherwise appear had not his adventures been given to the
world. And so the fact remains that Mr. Pickwick's spirit seems to
haunt the building, and no attempt is made to disabuse the mind that
his escapade was anything but an amusing if unfortunate reality.

The double-bedded room is a double-bedded room still, with its old
four-posters, and is shown with great pride to visitors from all
over the world as "Mr. Pickwick's room." The beds are still hung
with old-fashioned curtains, and a rush-bottomed chair has its place
there, as it did during Mr. Pickwick's visit. Even the wall-paper
is not of a modern pattern, and may have survived from that historic
night. At least these things were the same when we last visited it.

Indeed, all the rooms have still the atmosphere of. the Victorian
era about them. The coffee-room, the bar-parlour, the dining-room,
the courtyard and the assembly room reflect the Pickwickian period,
which in other words speak of "home-life ease and comfort," and "are
not subordinate to newfangled ideas." Whether the small room in the
vicinity of the stable-yard, where Mr. Weller, senior, was engaged