Chapter XI

. It is to-day, however, a vastly altered place from the merely “clean and commodious village ale-house” in which Mr. Pickwick found his moping, but still hungry, friend, and its “Dickens Room” is a veritable museum. Additions have been made to the house, and it is now more or less of a rustic hotel, with the sign of the leather bottle swinging in the breeze, and beneath it our Mr. Pickwick himself, in the immortal attitude depicted in the frontispiece to _The Pickwick Papers_, declaiming, with one arm outstretched, the other tucked away under his coat-tails.

[Illustration: THE DICKENS ROOM, “LEATHER BOTTLE,” COBHAM.]

The “inn on Marlborough Downs,” referred to in the Bagman’s Story in

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