"By degrees the prospect receded more and more on either hand, and as they had been shut out from rich and extensive scenery, so they emerged once again upon the open country. The knowledge that they were drawing near their place of destination gave them fresh courage to proceed; but the way had been difficult and they had loitered on the road, and Smike was tired! Thus twilight had already closed in, when they turned off the path to the door of a road-side inn, yet twelve miles short of Portsmouth.
"'Twelve miles,' said Nicholas, leaning with both hands on his stick, and looking doubtfully at Smike.
"'Twelve long miles,' repeated the landlord.
"'Very bad,' said the landlord. As, of course, being a landlord, he would say.
"'I want to get on,' observed Nicholas, hesitating. 'I scarcely know what to do.'
"'Don't let me influence you,' rejoined the landlord. 'I wouldn't go on if it was me.'"
And so here they stayed the night, much to their advantage.
The "handsome hotel," "between Park Lane and Bond Street," referred to in Chapter XXXII. of _Nicholas Nickleby_, cannot be identified: there are, and long have been, so many handsome hotels in that region. It was in the coffee-room of this establishment that Nicholas encountered Sir Mulberry Hawk; and the description of the affair brings back the memory of a state of things long past. The "Coffee-room" with its boxes partitioned off, no longer exists; there are no such things as those boxes anywhere now, except perhaps in some old-fashioned "eating-houses." But in that period of which Dickens wrote, the "coffee-room" of an hotel was an institution not so very long before copied from the then dead or fast-expiring "Coffee Houses" of the eighteenth century: once--in the days before clubs--the meeting-places of wits and business men. The Coffee House had been the club of its own particular age, and as there are nowadays clubs for every class and all professions, so in that period there were special Coffee Houses for individual groups of people, where they read the papers and learned the gossip of their circle.
Inns and hotels copied the institution of a public refreshment-room that would nowadays be styled the restaurant, and transferred the name of "Coffee-room," without specifically supplying the coffee; which, to be sure, was a beverage fast growing out of fashion, in favour of wines, beer, and brandy and water. No one drank whisky then.