Transcribed from the 1894 Chapman and Hall edition of “ChristmasStories” , email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Strictly speaking, there were only six Poor Travellers; but, beinga Traveller myself, though an idle one, and being withal as poor asI hope to be, I brought the number up to seven. This word of explanationis due at once, for what says the inscription over the quaint old door?
RICHARD WATTS, Esq.
by his Will, dated 22 Aug. 1579,
founded this Charity
for Six poor Travellers,
who not being ROGUES, or PROCTORS,
May receive gratis for one Night,
Lodging, Entertainment,
and Fourpence each.
It was in the ancient little city of Rochester in Kent, of all thegood days in the year upon a Christmas-eve, that I stood reading thisinscription over the quaint old door in question. I had been wanderingabout the neighbouring Cathedral, and had seen the tomb of Richard Watts,with the effigy of worthy Master Richard starting out of it like a ship’sfigure-head; and I had felt that I could do no less, as I gave the Vergerhis fee, than inquire the way to Watts’s Charity. The waybeing very short and very plain, I had come prosperously to the inscriptionand the quaint old door.
“Now,” said I to myself, as I looked at the knocker,“I know I am not a Proctor; I wonder whether I am a Rogue!”
Upon the whole, though Conscience reproduced two or three prettyfaces which might have had smaller attraction for a moral Goliath thanthey had had for me, who am but a Tom Thumb in that way, I came to theconclusion that I was not a Rogue. So, beginning to regard theestablishment as in some sort my property, bequeathed to me and diversco-legatees, share and share alike, by the Worshipful Master RichardWatts, I stepped backward into the road to survey my inheritance.
I found it to be a clean white house, of a staid and venerable air,with the quaint old door already three times mentioned (an arched door),choice little long low lattice-windows, and a roof of three gables. The silent High Street of Rochester is full of gables, with old beamsand timbers carved into strange faces. It is oddly garnished witha queer old clock that projects over the pavement out of a grave red-brickbuilding, as if Time carried on business there, and hung out his sign. Sooth to say, he did an active stroke of work in Rochester, in the olddays of the Romans, and the Saxons, and the Normans; and down to thetimes of King John, when the rugged castle—I will not undertaketo say how many hundreds of years old then—was abandoned to thecenturies of weather which have so defaced the dark apertures in itswalls, that the ruin looks as if the rooks and daws had pecked its eyesout.
I was very well pleased, both with my property and its situation. While I was yet surveying it with growing content, I espied, at oneof the upper lattices which stood open, a decent body, of a wholesomematronly appearance, whose eyes I caught inquiringly addressed to mine. They said so plainly, “Do you wish to see the house?” thatI answered aloud, “Yes, if you please.” And withina minute the old door opened, and I bent my head, and went down twosteps into the entry.
“This,” said the matronly presence, ushering me intoa low room on the right, “is where the Travellers sit by the fire,and cook what bits of suppers they buy with their fourpences.”
“O! Then they have no Entertainment?” said I. For the inscription over the outer door was still running in my head,and I was mentally repeating, in a kind of tune, “Lodging, entertainment,and fourpence each.”
“They have a fire provided for ’em,” returned thematron—a mighty civil person, not, as I