“Now you know my name,” said the gentleman; “Dick Datchery. Hang it up again. I was saying something old is what I should prefer, something odd and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and inconvenient.”
“We have a good choice of inconvenient lodgings in the town, sir, I think,” replied the waiter, with modest confidence in its resources that way; “indeed, I have no doubt that we could suit you that far, however particular you might be. But a architectural lodging!” That seemed to trouble the waiter’s head, and he shook it.
“Anything Cathedraly, now,” Mr. Datchery suggested.
“ Mr. Tope,” said the waiter, brightening, as he rubbed his chin with his hand, “would be the likeliest party to inform in that line.”
“Who is Mr. Tope?” inquired Dick Datchery.
The waiter explained that he was the Verger, and that Mrs. Tope had indeed once upon a time let lodgings herself—or offered to let them; but that as nobody had ever taken them, Mrs. Tope’s window-bill, long a Cloisterham Institution, had disappeared; probably had tumbled down one day, and never been put up again.
“I’ll call on Mrs. Tope,” said Mr. Datchery, “after dinner.”
So when he had done his dinner, he was duly directed to the spot, and sallied out for it. But the Crozier being an hotel of a most retiring disposition, and the waiter’s directions being fatally precise, he soon became bewildered, and went boggling about and about the Cathedral Tower, whenever he could catch a glimpse of it, with a general impression on his mind that Mrs. Tope’s was somewhere very near it, and that, like the children in the game of hot boiled beans and very good butter, he was warm in his search when he saw the Tower, and cold when he didn’t see it.