That life at Rock Park had in it more unadulterated English quality
than any other with which we became conversant while in England. With
the exception of a short sojourn in Leamington, it was the only
experience vouchsafed us of renting a house. All the rest of the time
we lived in lodging or boarding houses, or in hotels. The
boarding-houses of England are like other boarding-houses; the hotels,
or inns, in the middle of the last century, were for the most part
plain and homely compared with what we have latterly been used to; but
the English lodging-house system had peculiarities. You enjoyed
independence, but you paid for it with inconveniences. The owner of
the house furnished you with nothing except the house, with its dingy
beds, chairs, tables, and carpets. Everything else necessary to
existence you got for yourself. You made your own contracts with
butcher, baker, and grocer. You did your own firing and lighting.
Your sole conversation with the owner was over the weekly bill for the
rooms. You might cater to yourself to the tune of the prince or of the
pauper, as your means or your inclination suggested, but you must do
it upon the background of the same dingy rooms. Dingy or not so dingy,
the rooms, of course, never fitted you; they were a Procrustes bed,
always incompatible, in one way or in another, with the proportions
which nature had bestowed upon you. You wondered, in your misanthropic
moments, whether there ever was or could be any one whom English
lodgings would exactly fit. Probably they were designed for the
average man, a person, as we all know, who exists only in the
imagination of statisticians. And if the environment shows the man,
one cannot help rejoicing that there is so little likelihood of one's
forming the average man's acquaintance.

There was nothing peculiar about rented houses in England beyond the
innate peculiarities attaching to them as English. If the house were