Tales From the White Hart has long been one of my favorites. One major reason is that a place, very much like the White Hart played a large role in my education.
It was called the Peabody Bookshop & Beer Stube and was located in a basement of one of the row houses on Charles Street just a ways north of Mount Vernon Place. It had a small black sign out front that had not been painted since the time that H. L. Menken hung out there. You entered down a short flight of stairs and emerged into a room with a wide assortment odd and varied book cases filled with a collection of cast off books from rumage and estate sales. At one time the books were carefully arranged in the order of space availablity but even that concession to system had been modified by those sampling what was there.
At the rear of the room was a doorway, low enough that you had to stoop as you passed through with a step down into a long, narrow, dark room. The floor was made of old cobble stones and far away, at the rear, was a fireplace that covered most of the wall. On the left were the stairs leading to the living quarters of the house (and the perfectly normal kitchen where what passed for food was prepared), a small bathroom and a long bar with no stools. The room was filled with massive oaken tables, heavily annodated with carved initials and pithy comment.
Sitting before the open fireplace was the one long table in the place, and it was there that the regulars gathered. They were made up of an odd assortment, musicians from the Peabody Conservatory that sat on the other side of Mount Vernon Place, students and professors from the Hopkins and Loyola College, retired vaudeville actors and even a few strippers from the Gaietey as well as bums such as myself.
The attraction of the rear table was the flow of ideas that swept across the folk gathered. One night might be devoted to puns, another to science, or perhaps theology or philosophy, history or politics. The effects of the Great White Fleet were discussed as well as the fleets that set out to destroy Troy.
Everyone should have the advantage of a White Hart. It is in places such as that, or here at EvC, that we really learn. It's not books, but the challenge to knowledge and perception, the anvil and hammer that temper our opinions that counts.
This message has been edited by jar, 02-25-2005 11:23 AM
Aslan is not a Tame Lion
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