His talk about
his collection of flints, however, sent my mind off to Flinty Point
and the never-to-be-forgotten flint-built walls of Raxton church.
After dinner, coffee, liquors, and tobacco being introduced into the
dining-room, I got up, intending to roam about outside the hotel till
bedtime; but the rain, I found, was falling in torrents. I was
compelled to return to my friend of the 'flints.' At that moment one
of the artists plunged into a comic song, and by the ecstatic look of
the company I knew that a purgatorial time was before me. I resigned
myself to my fate. Song followed song, until at last even my friend
of the flints struck up the ballad of _Little Billee_, whose
lugubrious refrain seemed to 'set the table in a roar'; but to me it
will always be associated with sickening heartache.
As soon as the rain ceased I left the hotel and went to the room in
the little town the landlord had engaged for me. There, with the roar
in my ears of the mountain streams (swollen by the rains), I went to
bed and, strange to say, slept.
Next morning I rose early, breakfasted at 'The Royal Oak' as soon as
I could get attended to, and proceeded in the direction in which,
according to what I had gathered from various sources, Mrs.
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