THE dining-room was very old. Nothing, one felt, had been altered in it for a century. From the massive silver candelabrum standing exactly in the middle of the buffet with console legs at one end of the room and seeming to overawe the entire space with its gleaming majesty, to the tall Etruscan Wedgwood vases in the lofty window embrasures, all was exactly the same as when old gentlemen in grey beaver hats and black stocks lifted tired, perspiring children out of postchaises, and the mail-coaches for Holyhead rolled past its open door. Nothing had changed, not even the position of the tables. The meals were still punctually ten minutes late, as they had always been; for however near the twentieth century might creep, there was a spirit which guarded the old hotel.
The mail-coaches for Holyhead no longer rolled by the door, and around the corner there was the desolation of empty yawning stables of granite to witness the fact. But the stables had never been torn down, and if any traveller had deliberately entered the hotel to ask "when the 'bus started for Bangor," no one would have known. That was what the old hotel was like! With the movements of such new-fangled matters as 'buses, it naturally had nothing to do; and throughout the green-walled dining-room the meals were conducted with the stately ceremonial of the past. One felt that the same spirit must be brooding over the bedrooms upstairs, for nothing—nothing whatever—had been permitted to disturb it. True, there were waitresses now in the dining-room, but the youngest of these was silver-haired. And they said "good afternoon" in such a manner that one felt certain that they, too, had somehow been trained, cherished, protected by the hotel itself since babyhood.
We had walked into the hotel casually, my companion and I, impelled by curiosity to take lunch in this huge rambling structure with the grey stone columns in the style of the classic revival, facing its entrance. We had been admitted into the "coffee-room" with-
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