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[2] An urn for brewing ordinary tea.
During the traveller's inspection of his room his luggage was brought
into the apartment. First came a portmanteau of white leather whose
raggedness indicated that the receptacle had made several previous
journeys. The bearers of the same were the gentleman's coachman,
Selifan (a little man in a large overcoat), and the gentleman's valet,
Petrushka--the latter a fellow of about thirty, clad in a worn,
over-ample jacket which formerly had graced his master's shoulders,
and possessed of a nose and a pair of lips whose coarseness
communicated to his face rather a sullen expression. Behind the
portmanteau came a small dispatch-box of redwood, lined with birch
bark, a boot-case, and (wrapped in blue paper) a roast fowl; all of
which having been deposited, the coachman departed to look after his
horses, and the valet to establish himself in the little dark anteroom
or kennel where already he had stored a cloak, a bagful of livery, and
his own peculiar smell. Pressing the narrow bedstead back against the
wall, he covered it with the tiny remnant of mattress--a remnant as
thin and flat (perhaps also as greasy) as a pancake--which he had
managed to beg of the landlord of the establishment.
While the attendants had been thus setting things straight the
gentleman had repaired to the common parlour. The appearance of common
parlours of the kind is known to every one who travels. Always they
have varnished walls which, grown black in their upper portions with
tobacco smoke, are, in their lower, grown shiny with the friction of
customers' backs--more especially with that of the backs of such local
tradesmen as, on market-days, make it their regular practice to resort
to the local hostelry for a glass of tea. Also, parlours of this kind
invariably contain smutty ceilings, an equally smutty chandelier, a
number of pendent shades which jump and rattle whenever the waiter
scurries across the shabby oilcloth with a trayful of glasses (the
glasses looking like a flock of birds roosting by the seashore), and a
selection of oil paintings. In short, there are certain objects which
one sees in every inn. In the present case the only outstanding
feature of the room was the fact that in one of the paintings a nymph
was portrayed as possessing breasts of a size such as the reader can
never in his life have beheld. A similar caricaturing of nature is to
be noted in the historical pictures (of unknown origin, period, and
creation) which reach us--sometimes through the instrumentality of
Russian magnates who profess to be connoisseurs of art--from Italy;
owing to the said magnates having made such purchases solely on the
advice of the couriers who have escorted them.
To resume, however--our traveller removed his cap, and divested his
neck of a parti-coloured woollen scarf of the kind which a wife makes
for her husband with her own hands, while accompanying the gift with
interminable injunctions as to how best such a garment ought to be
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