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Updated: June 3, 2025
The bar itself was a sort of little window-sill on the right: the pub was a small one. In this window-opening stood the landlady, drawing and serving to her husband. Behind the bar was a tiny parlour or den, the landlady's preserve. "Oh, it's you," she said, bobbing down to look at the newcomer. None entered her bar-parlour unless invited. "Come in," said the landlady.
Beyond the change of name the hotel to-day is practically the same as it was in those early days, the only material alteration being the conversion of the kitchen into a bar-parlour and smoking-room, where the open chimney and corner seats have given place to more modern and ornate substitutes. Situated in the main street this old posting house is a prominent feature.
There was only one other occupant of the bar-parlour when we adjourned thither, and a glance at him told me that he was not ostentatiously sober. He was lying back in a chair, with his feet on the side-table, and crooning slowly, in a melancholy voice, the following words: 'I don't care if he wears a crown, He can't keep kicking my dawg aroun'.
Plummer lifted his finger and pointed quickly toward the bar-parlour; and at the signal the one-eyed man turned with great deliberation and pulled a catch which released the door of that apartment, close at our elbows. We stepped quickly within, and presently the one-eyed man came rolling in by the other door. "Well, good art'noon, Mr. Plummer, sir," he said, with a long intonation and a wheeze.
On a bare table I perceived a candle, and ventured to put a match to it. I then saw almost exactly such a room as one would expect to find at the rear of the bar-parlour of an inn on the outskirts of an industrial town. It appeared to serve the double purpose of a living-room and of a retreat for favoured customers. The table was evidently one at which men drank.
And as he walked down the long sanded passage which led from the committee-room to the front entrance of the inn, old Rob Walford, the landlord, came out of the bow-windowed bar-parlour, beckoned him, with a mystery-suggesting air, to follow, and led him into a private room, the door of which he carefully closed.
For some while sleep was forbidden by a confusion of voices in the bar-parlour downstairs; then, after a brief lull, the same voices started exchanging good-nights in the square without; and finally, when the rest had dispersed, two belated townsmen lingered in private conversation, now walking a few paces to and fro on the cobbles, but ever returning to anchorage under a street lamp beneath his window.
Remember that most of them have read far less than you, and that you can draw upon an experience of travel of which they can know nothing; do but make the plunge, practising first in the villages of the Midlands, I will warrant you that in a very little while bold assertion of this kind will carry you through any tap-room or bar-parlour in Britain.
But to-day a stuffy, red-curtained bar-parlour would have been more cheerful. At first, I thought we were alone in the waste of painted wicker-work, for there had been dead silence on our entrance; but hardly had we settled ourselves to await the coming of the landlord, when a movement at the far end of the big, dim room told me that it had other occupants.
Or she was sitting in the bar-parlour on an upturned cube-sugar box beside the green rep sofa where Bough lolled on wet days or stormy nights, her great eyes wild with apprehension, her every nerve tense and strained with terror of the master in his condescending moods, when he would make pretence of teaching her to scrawl coarse pothooks and hangers on the greasy slate that usually hung below the glass-and-bottle shelf.
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