I have said hostelry, and undoubtedly the words "Seaview Hotel," in letters large and green, were inscribed upon its pink-washed walls, but without this clue I do not think the closest observer would be able to detect its walk in life. It had but one storey; a dark and narrow passage led from the entrance to the kitchen, and therein, at (as subsequent experience showed us) any time of the day or night, the entire establishment might be found, massed, talking as though they had not met for years, and were to separate in an hour.
Thus we, led by our carman, an habitué of the house, found them, and thus, with but brief intervals, they continued during the period we spent among them.
"What is it, Mike?" this to the car-driver from a very stout lady, whom we rightly assumed to be the proprietress. "Oh—the sitting-room," she exhibited a natural annoyance, having been interrupted in a pronouncement on, I gathered, the feeding of pigs. "Here! Mary Kate, show the sitting-room!" She re-addressed herself to her subject.
Mary Kate, a charming slattern with a profusion of fair hair, "showed" the sitting-room. It was small, but not unclean, and, in addition to the normal outfit of table and chairs, was remarkably equipped with a large double perambulator, whose use as a sideboard was sufficiently indicated by the fact that a cruet stand and a loaf of bread occupied one seat, while a piece of cold beef reclined on the other. The bedrooms, if I may quote a French guide-book's remarks upon the retreat of a hermit, "excited I know not what emotions of religious terror;" emotions that were not allayed by the suspicion, that deepened to certainty, that, in the absence of visitors, they were occupied by the staff.
"Hot wather? O cerr*tainly!" said Mary Kate, kindly. "Beg your pardon—" she crushed past me to the chimney-piece, and proceeded to grope behind photograph frames and a crowded multitude of glass and china, *objets d'art. "I left me hat pins—" here she giggled confidentially, while, so intimate was the arrangement of the objets d'art, that several of them fell off at the farther end of the chimney piece. "Ah! what matther! Sure they're all a little broke!" said Mary Kate, wedging them into their places again, and thrusting the recovered hat pins into her redundant locks. "Ye'll be wanting somethin' to eat now, I daresay," she went on, "I'll send granne'ma in to ye."
A brief interval ensued, during which we furtively examined the bedclothes, and indulged in disturbed conjecture as to the substance that stuffed the pillows. Their smell, though curious, offered no basis for theory.
There came a creeping sound without, and low down, a panel of the door was dealt a single blow.
I said "Come in!" not without a slight recurrence of religious terror.
A very little and ancient woman stood there, with the trade marks of soot and grease thick upon her. When she curtseyed she seemed to merge in the door mat, so small was she and so dingy.
There was reassurance in the discovery that she seemed as much in awe of us as we of her.