failed to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are indeed so
deeply buried in the soil of our early culture that, without some
great upheaval of feeling, we are at a loss to say exactly when
and where and how it begins. It makes an American's enjoyment of
England an emotion more searching than anything Continental. I
had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at home--at
Saragossa Illinois--in books, in visions, in dreams, in Dickens,
in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small and subdivided into six
narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular screens of
mahogany, something higher than a man's stature, furnished on
either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in
ancient Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a
narrow table--a table expected under stress to accommodate no
less than four pairs of active British elbows. High pressure
indeed had passed away from the Red Lion for ever. It now knew
only that of memories and ghosts and atmosphere. Round the room
there marched, breast-high, a magnificent panelling of mahogany,
so dark with time and so polished with unremitted friction that
by gazing a while into its lucid blackness I made out the dim
reflexion of a party of wigged gentlemen in knee-breeches just
arrived from York by the coach. On the dark yellow walls, coated
by the fumes of English coal, of English mutton, of Scotch
whiskey, were a dozen melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age--
the Derby favourite of the year 1807, the Bank of England, her
Majesty the Queen. On the floor was a Turkey carpet--as old as
the mahogany almost, as the Bank of England, as the Queen--into
which the waiter had in his lonely revolutions trodden so many
massive soot-flakes and drops of overflowing beer that the
glowing looms of Smyrna would certainly not have recognised it.
To say that I ordered my dinner of this archaic type would be