Fellowship Porters as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond
its door. For this reason, in combination with the fact that the house
was all but afloat at high water, when the Porters had a family wash the
linen subjected to that operation might usually be seen drying on lines
stretched across the reception-rooms and bed-chambers.

The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and
doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age
fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had
become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots
started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into
some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an
air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without
reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters,
that when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and
particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut-wood in the bar, you
might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree,
in full umbrageous leaf.

The bar of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters was a bar to soften the
human breast. The available space in it was not much larger than a
hackney-coach; but no one could have wished the bar bigger, that space
was so girt in by corpulent little casks, and by cordial-bottles
radiant with fictitious grapes in bunches, and by lemons in nets, and
by biscuits in baskets, and by the polite beer-pulls that made low
bows when customers were served with beer, and by the cheese in a snug
corner, and by the landlady's own small table in a snugger corner near
the fire, with the cloth everlastingly laid. This haven was divided from
the rough world by a glass partition and a half-door, with a leaden
sill upon it for the convenience of resting your liquor; but, over this