We see it with the eye of a lover, and we know that it is good.
Having got as far as this, we took the trouble to count all the words up to this point. The total is exactly 1100.
The other evening we went with Titania to a ramshackle country hotel which calls itself _The Mansion House_, looking forward to a fine robust meal. It was a transparent, sunny, cool evening, and when we saw on the bill of fare _half broiled chicken_, we innocently supposed that the word _half_ was an adjective modifying the compound noun, _broiled-chicken_. Instead, to our sorrow and disappointment, it proved to be an adverb modifying _broiled_ (we hope we parse the matter correctly). At any rate, the wretched fowl was blue and pallid, a little smoked on the exterior, raw and sinewy within, and an affront to the whole profession of innkeeping. Whereupon, in the days that followed, looking back at our fine mood of expectancy as we entered that hostelry, and its pitiable collapse when the miserable travesty of victuals was laid before us, we fell to thinking about some of the inns we had known of old time where we had feasted not without good heart.
To speak merely by sudden memory, for instance, there was the fine old hotel in Burlington, Vermont--is it called the _Van Ness House_?--where we remember a line of cane-bottomed chairs on a long shady veranda, where one could look out and see the town simmering in that waft of hot and dazzling sunshine that pours across Lake Champlain in the late afternoon: and _The Black Lion_, Lavenham, Suffolk; where (unless we confuse it with a pub in Bury St. Edmunds where we had lunch), there was, in the hallway, a very fine old engraving called "Pirates Decoying a Merchantman," in which one pirate, dressed in woman's clothes, stood up above the bulwarks waving for assistance, while the cutlassed ruffians crouched below ready to do their bloody work when the other ship came near enough. Nor have we forgotten _The Saracen's Head_, at Ware, whence we went exploring down the little river Lea on Izaak Walton's trail; nor _The Swan_ at Bibury in Gloucestershire, hard by that clear green water the Colne; nor another _Swan_ at Tetsworth in Oxfordshire, which one reaches after bicycling over the beechy slope of the Chilterns, and where, in the narrow taproom, occurred the fabled encounter between a Texas Rhodes Scholar logged with port wine and seven Oxfordshire yokels who made merry over his power of carrying the red blood of the grape.