hotels,--square, solid, old-fashioned, looking so hospitable and
comfortable, with their great signs swinging from some elm-tree in front,
and the long row of stables standing a little back, with a chaise or two
in the yard, and the jolly landlord talking of the crops to some stout
farmer, whose rough pony halts of itself at the well-known door.
Opposite this inn, on the other side of the road, stood the habitation of
Dr. Riecabocca.

A few years before the date of these annals, the stage-coach on its way
to London from a seaport town stopped at the inn, as was its wont, for a
good hour, that its passengers might dine like Christian Englishmen--not
gulp down a basin of scalding soup, like everlasting heathen Yankees,
with that cursed railway-whistle shrieking like a fiend in their ears!
It was the best dining-place on the whole road, for the trout in the
neighbouring rill were famous, and so was the mutton which came from
Hazeldean Park.

From the outside of the coach had descended two passengers, who, alone
insensible to the attractions of mutton and trout, refused to dine,--two
melancholy-looking foreigners, of whom one was Signor Riccabocca, much
the same as we see him now, only that the black suit was less threadbare,
the tall form less meagre, and he did not then wear spectacles; and the
other was his servant. "They would walk about while the coach stopped."
Now the Italian's eye had been caught by a mouldering, dismantled house
on the other side the road, which nevertheless was well situated; half-
way up a green hill, with its aspect due south, a little cascade falling
down artificial rockwork, a terrace with a balustrade, and a few broken
urns and statues before its Ionic portico, while on the roadside stood a
board, with characters already half effaced, implying that the house was
"To be let unfurnished, with or without land."