Refreshments for Travellers
In the late high winds I was blown to a great many places - and indeed, wind or no wind,
I generally have extensive transactions on hand in the article of Air - but I have not been
blown to any English place lately, and I very seldom have blown to any English place in
my life, where I could get anything good to eat and drink in five minutes, or where, if I
sought it, I was received with a welcome.
This is a curious thing to consider. But before (stimulated by my own experiences and the
representations of many fellow-travellers of every uncommercial and commercial degree)
I consider it further, I must utter a passing word of wonder concerning high winds.
I wonder why metropolitan gales always blow so hard at Walworth. I cannot imagine
what Walworth has done, to bring such windy punishment upon itself, as I never fail to
find recorded in the newspapers when the wind has blown at all hard. Brixton seems to
have something on its conscience; Peckham suffers more than a virtuous Peckham might
be supposed to deserve; the howling neighbourhood of Deptford figures largely in the
accounts of the ingenious gentlemen who are out in every wind that blows, and to whom
it is an ill high wind that blows no good; but, there can hardly be any Walworth left by
this time. It must surely be blown away. I have read of more chimney-stacks and house-
copings coming down with terrific smashes at Walworth, and of more sacred edifices
being nearly (not quite) blown out to sea from the same accursed locality, than I have
read of practised thieves with the appearance and manners of gentlemen - a popular
phenomenon which never existed on earth out of fiction and a police report. Again: I
wonder why people are always blown into the Surrey Canal, and into no other piece of
water! Why do people get up early and go out in groups, to be blown into the Surrey
Canal? Do they say to one another, 'Welcome death, so that we get into the newspapers'?
Even that would be an insufficient explanation, because even then they might sometimes
put themselves in the way of being blown into the Regent's Canal, instead of always
saddling Surrey for the field. Some nameless policeman, too, is constantly, on the
slightest provocation, getting himself blown into this same Surrey Canal. Will SIR
RICHARD MAYNE see to it, and restrain that weak-minded and feeble-bodied
constable?
To resume the consideration of the curious question of Refreshment. I am a Briton, and,
as such, I am aware that I never will be a slave - and yet I have latent suspicion that there
must be some slavery of wrong custom in this matter.
I travel by railroad. I start from home at seven or eight in the morning, after breakfasting
hurriedly. What with skimming over the open landscape, what with mining in the damp
bowels of the earth, what with banging, booming and shrieking the scores of miles away,
I am hungry when I arrive at the 'Refreshment' station where I am expected. Please to
observe, expected. I have said, I am hungry; perhaps I might say, with greater point and
force, that I am to some extent exhausted, and that I need - in the expressive French sense
of the word - to be restored. What is provided for my restoration? The apartment that is to
