Chapter X — The inn-keeper approached to ask me what I wanted for supper.
He was a pot-bellied man, with a red nose, wall-eyes, and a smile that made the circuit of his head. At every word he uttered he showed a double row of pointed teeth with spaces between, like an ogre's.
A bright light shone through the leaded windows of the hotel, whose tin sign swung from right to left and moaned like an old woman, for the north wind was beginning to freshen.—I turned my horse over to a groom and entered the kitchen.
An enormous fire-place at the end of the room swallowed in its black and red maw a bundle of fagots at every mouthful, and on each side of the andirons, two dogs, almost as large as men, sat on their hind-quarters, roasting themselves with all imaginable phlegm, content to raise their paws a little and heave a sort of sigh when the heat became more intense; but they certainly would have preferred to be reduced to charcoal rather than move back an inch.
My arrival did not seem to please them, and I tried in vain to make their acquaintance by patting them on the head several times; they cast stealthy glances at me that boded no good.—That astonished me, for animals generally take to me.
The inn-keeper approached to ask me what I wanted for supper.