—I declare I never was so snubbed in my life!
’Twas but six quarters of an hour on foot to Neuchâtel, the carpenter told us.—The road in the late afternoon was full of fine carriages and shabby carts; and in sight of Neuchâtel we passed men and women going home from work. We asked one man if there was an inn in the town.——
“Il-y-a-douze,” he answered, with great effort, and hurried on, so that we had not time to tell him we too could speak English.
We wondered so small a town should be so rich in inns. But douze, it seemed, was the English way of saying deux. A woman standing in the first doorway assured us there were but two—one opposite the church, and another, the Pas de Cœur—we understood her to say, around the corner.—At the foot of the hill we found the first, with Boarding-House in large black letters on its newly whitewashed walls. As there never was any sentiment in a Boarding-House except in Dr. Holmes’ books, or any cheapness in a foreign hotel with an English sign, we looked for the other inn. But when we had wheeled up the street and down the street, until its want of heart became ours, we gave up the search and returned to the Boarding-House.
THE BOARDING-HOUSE OF NEUCHÂTEL.
A FAT old landlady received us, after a glance at the tricycle had reassured her that to take us in did not mean to be taken in herself. She promised us dinner at six, and a room in the course of the evening. In the café, or outer kitchen, where she gave us chairs, an elderly Cinderella was blacking boots and peeling potatoes in the fireplace; a pretty girl was carrying tumblers and clean linen to a near room; another, with a big baby in her arms, gossiped with neighbours on the front steps. The landlady hurried back to the small kitchen, through the open door of which we could see her bustling about among the pots and pans.
Presently a little man, in white trousers and brown velveteen waistcoat, wandered in from the stable-yard to clink glasses with a friend at the bar, and drink without pause two mugs of beer and one glass of brandy. Then he gave us a dance and a song.
And then there came trooping into the room huntsmen with dogs and guns, and servants bearing long poles strung with rabbits, and three ladies in silks and gold chains and ribbons, and a small boy. The huntsmen were given cognac and absinthe; the ladies were led away through a narrow passage, but they returned in a minute, with pitchers which they themselves filled from a barrel near the kitchen-door.