Chapter XXXV

. we find Mr. Pickwick, on his way to Bath, waiting for the coach in the travellers’-room of the “White Horse Cellar,” Piccadilly, a very brilliant star of an inn, indeed, in its day; but rather a migratory one, for in the coaching age it was removed from its original site at the corner of Arlington Street, where the Ritz Hotel stands now, to the opposite side of the road, at the corner of Albemarle Street. There it remained until 1884, when the old house was pulled down and the present “Albemarle” built in its stead.

[Illustration: THE “WHITE HART,” BATH.]

Mr. Pickwick was “twenty minutes too early” for the half-past seven o’clock in the morning coach, and so, leaving Sam Weller single-handedly to contend with the seven or eight porters who had flung themselves upon the luggage, he and his friends went for shelter to “the travellers’-room--the last resource of human dejection”--railways in general and the waiting-rooms of Clapham Junction in especial not having at that time come into existence, to plunge mankind into deeper abysms of melancholia.

“The travellers’-room at the ‘White Horse Cellar’ is, of course, uncomfortable; it would be no travellers’-room if it were not. It is the right-hand parlour, into which an aspiring kitchen fireplace appears to have walked, accompanied by a rebellious poker, tongs, and shovel. It is divided into boxes, for the solitary confinement of travellers, and is furnished with a clock, a looking-glass, and a live waiter: which latter article is kept in a small kennel for washing glasses, in a corner of the apartment.”

So now we know what the primeval ancestor of the Railway Waiting-room, with its advertisements of cheap excursions to places to which you do not want to go, and its battered Bible on the table was like, and it seems pretty clear that, whatever the travellers’-room of a coaching inn might have been, its present representative is a degenerate.

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