They were very plainly furnished, the only thing in the way
of decoration being a production in watercolour representing a fair green
crowded with herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, and adorned with sundry
pastoral and agricultural emblems, from the brush of my friend _Cynicus_.
This I framed and hung in the dining-room. As it had columns for
recording statistics of the fair for a period of years, it was
instructive as well as ornamental. Three of the bedrooms were on the
ground floor and were small apartments. The upstair rooms were much
larger, were situated in the roof, and were lit by skylight windows which
commanded a limited view of the firmament above but none whatever of the
green earth below. These upper rooms were reached by an almost
perpendicular staircase surmounted by a trap door, a mode of access
convenient enough for the young and active, but not suitable for those of
us who had passed their meridian. Two of these rooms were double-bedded
and all three led into each other. In the innermost, Atock, our
locomotive engineer, and I chummed together. He had slept there for many
years, with two previous managers, and, in Robinson Crusoe fashion, had
recorded the years by notches in a beam of the ceiling.
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