Beds.'
My first knock put a period to the music, and a voice challenged
tipsily from within.
'Who goes there?' it said; and I replied, 'A lawful traveller.'
Immediately after, the door was unbarred by a company of the
tallest lads my eyes had ever rested on, all astonishingly drunk
and very decently dressed, and one (who was perhaps the drunkest of
the lot) carrying a tallow candle, from which he impartially
bedewed the clothes of the whole company. As soon as I saw them I
could not help smiling to myself to remember the anxiety with which
I had approached. They received me and my hastily-concocted story,
that I had been walking from Peebles and had lost my way, with
incoherent benignity; jostled me among them into the room where
they had been sitting, a plain hedgerow alehouse parlour, with a
roaring fire in the chimney and a prodigious number of empty
bottles on the floor; and informed me that I was made, by this
reception, a temporary member of the Six-Feet-High Club, an
athletic society of young men in a good station, who made of the
Hunters' Tryst a frequent resort. They told me I had intruded on
an 'all-night sitting,' following upon an 'all-day Saturday tramp'
of forty miles; and that the members would all be up and 'as right
as ninepence' for the noonday service at some neighbouring church--
Collingwood, if memory serves me right.
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