D'Artagnan, the King Maker — page 22: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Avoid a New Inn. 15 Such seasoned leather, soft as silk though thick, and good workmanship could only have come out of the workshop of a cordwainer of Cordovan training, where the tradition was maintained. His Moorish saddle was probably of the same origin. As he mounted the ascent, he perceived some signs ot a path. Bare feet and bark-soled sandals had traced it. It led him in under the beetling barrier to the sea’s con- tinual encroachment, the sides of spar fretted intricately and fantastically to equal the finest efforts of the artifi- cers of the Alhambra. “°Sdeath!” exclaimed he, with Spanish accent forti- fied with Gascon, “this is the inn. Faith of a gentleman! have we the Northmen scourers of the sea again upon the rocky coast of his majesty of United Spain and Por- tugal, that even that hallowed institution, the tavern, respected by German riders and Italian bandits, should shrink with terror into the granite?” As if to prove how wrong or right was his surmise, there darted a man out of the opening and shadow be- yond, who blocked his way, but ‘hospitably. For he opened his arms and his hands in that gesture which signifies in that latitude that all that the house contains is at the order of the person motioned to. It was a host, whether the opening was an inn door or not. Accustomed to the dusk, the traveler looked over the man’s head, the more easy as he was short, and distin- guished a rough inner portal of ship oak, fit to resist a battering-ram ; and, beyond, the beginning of a corri- dor, wide, or a room, narrow, prolonged by the obscur- ity, into indefiniteness. For a fitting description of this cavernous hostel, one would have to search “Ossian.” | There was an attempt to light up this vast interior: a ship lantern swung on high under a stretch of canvas,’ supplied with oil, and that less strongly smelling. Sev- eral candles, certainly such as are made for churches, were stuck in cracks on the rocky wall. All these rays fell on a table, evidently from a great West Indiaman, since it was of mahogany, not well known to European COMNICMOoOoOKS.E@ im