Well, I Had To Sleep Somewhere, I Told Her:
Couldn't She Direct Me To A Cottage Where I Could Get
A bed?
No, she couldn't - it is always so; but after the third time of
asking she unfroze so far
As to say that perhaps they would
take me in at a cottage close by. So I went, and a poor kind
widow who lived there with a son consented to put me up. She
made a nice fire in the sitting-room, and after warming myself
before it, while watching the firelight and shadows playing on
the dim walls and ceiling, it came to me that I was not in a
cottage, but in a large room with an oak floor and
wainscoting. "Do you call this a cottage?" I said to the
woman when she came in with tea. "No, I have it as a cottage,
but it is an old farm-house called the Rookery," she returned.
Then, for the first time, I remembered Rural Rides. "This
then is the very house where William Cobbett used to stay
seventy or eighty years ago," I said. She had never heard of
William Cobbett; she only knew that at that date it had been
tenanted by a farmer named Blount, a Roman Catholic, who had
some curious ideas about the land.
That settled it. Blount was the name of Cobbett's friend, and
I had come to the very house where Cobbett was accustomed to
stay. But how odd that my first thought of the man should
have come to me when sitting by the fire where Cobbett himself
had sat on many a cold evening!
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