University of Virginia Library

THE INN KITCHEN.

During a journey that I once made through the Nctherlands,
I had arrived one evening at the Pomme d' Or,
the principal inn of a small Flemish village. It was after
the hour of the table d'hote, so that I was obliged to make
a solitary supper from the reliques of its ampler board.
The weather was chilly; I was seated alone in one end
of a great gloomy dining-room, and my repast being over,
I had the prospect before me of a long dull evening, without
any visible means of enlivening it. I summoned
mine host, and requested something to read; he brought
me the whole literary stock of his household, a Dutch
family-bible, an almanack in the same language, and a
number of old Paris newspapers. As I sat dozing over
one of the latter, reading old news and stale criticisms,
my ear was now and then struck with bursts of laughter
which seemed to proceed from the kitchen. Every one
that has travelled on the continent must know how favourite
a resort the kitchen of a country inn is to the
middle and inferior order of travellers; particularly in
that equivocal kind of weather, when a fire becomes agreeable
towards evening. I threw aside the newspaper, and
explored my way to the kitchen, to take a peep at the
group that appeared to be so merry. It was composed
partly of travellers who had arrived some hours before in
a diligence, and partly of the usual attendants and hangers-on
of inns. They were seated round a great burnished
stove, that might have been mistaken for an altar, at
which they were worshipping. It was covered with
various kitchen vessels of resplendent brightness; among

which steamed and hissed a huge copper tea-kettle. A
large lamp threw a strong mass of light upon the group
bringing out many odd features in strong relief. Its
yellow rays partially illumined the spacious kitchen, dying
duskily away into remote corners; except where they
settled into mellow radiance on the broad side of a flitch of
bacon, or were reflected back from well-scoured utensils,
that gleamed from the midst of obscurity. A strapping
Flemish lass, with long golden pendants in her ears, and a
necklace with a golden heart suspended to it, was the presiding
priestess of the temple.

Many of the company were furnished with pipes, and
most of them with some kind of evening potation. I found
their mirth was occasioned by anecdotes, which a little
swarthy Frenchman, with a dry weazen face and large
whiskers, was giving of his love adventures; at the end of
each of which, there was one of those bursts of honest unceremonious
laughter, in which a man indulges in that
temple of true liberty, an inn.

As I had no better mode of getting through a tedious
blustering evening, I took my seat near the stove, and
listened to a variety of travellers' tales, some very extravagant,
and most very dull. All of them, however, have
faded from my treacherous memory except one, which I
will endeavour to relate. I fear, however, it derived its
chief zest from the manner in which it was told, and the
peculiar air and appearance of the narrator. He was a
corpulent old Swiss, who had the look of a veteran traveller.
He was dressed in a tarnished green travelling
jacket, with a broad belt round his waist, and a pair of
overalls, with buttons from the hips to the ancles. He
was of a full rubicund countenance, with a double chin,
aquiline nose, and a pleasant twinkling eye. His hair
was light, and curled from under an old green velvet travelling
cap stuck on one side of his head. He was interrupted
more than once by the arrival of guests, or the
remarks of his auditors; and paused now and then to replenish
his pipe; at which times he had generally a roguish
leer, and a sly joke for the buxom kitchen maid.

I wish my reader could imagine the old fellow lolling
in a huge arm-chair, one arm a-kimbo, the other holding
a curiously twisted tobacco pipe, formed of genuine e'cume
de mer, decorated with silver chain and silken tassel—his
head cocked on one side, and a whimsical cut of the eye
occasionally, as he related the following story.