A hostelry is not a retreat for “hosses” any more than a boarding house is a timber mill, but there are occasions when the harassed wayfarer is forced to the conclusion that his traveller's guide has deceived him. When, just as he is about to slip off into slumber, number 13 next door engages in a death-grapple with a python; when the hot-water cistern boils over on the roof above his head, and the last homing boarder climbs the fire escape with a sack of empty tins on his back (seemingly); when mutiny breaks out among the “lizzies” in the garage next door; when the bathroom is so close and the partitions so thin that he can hear the soap bubbles burst as No. 17a goes in off the deep end at the zero hour. When a clicking-beetle plies his trade in the wall and the dog in the yard recollects a bereavement and makes no secret of it. When some person or persons unknown emit nasal reverberations page 14 which sound like a squad of demented drapers tearing up bolts of calico, and the night is split, riven, and torn asunder by divers explosions and vibrations, then the tired traveller, if perchance he is an old soldier, sighs for the comparative quiet of the front line.