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Perhaps Tom Austin had thought it his duty to cast anchor in Twofold Bay, for the sea was heavy, and a ship would not dare to venture near the shore. "To Eden!" cried Glenarvan. Immediately the mail-coach resumed the route round the bay, toward the little town of Eden, five miles distant. The postilions stopped not far from the lighthouse, which marks the entrance of the port.
Although Glasgow had become a place of considerable wealth and importance, the roads to it, north of Carlisle, continued in a very unsatisfactory state. It was only in July, 1788, that the first mail-coach from London had driven into Glasgow by that route, when it was welcomed by a procession of the citizens on horseback, who went out several miles to meet it.
Rats again! there are none about mail-coaches, any more than snakes in Van Troil's Iceland; except, indeed, now and then a parliamentary rat, who always hides his shame in the "coal cellar." And, as to fire, I never knew but one in a mail-coach, which was in the Exeter mail, and caused by an obstinate sailor bound to Devonport.
The interview between Lady Eversleigh and her visitor was a long one. It was half-past ten o'clock before the strange-looking countryman quitted the blue parlour. This occurred three days before Christmas-day. On the following evening another stranger arrived at Frimley by the mail-coach, which passed through the quiet town at about seven o'clock.
The horse-drawn mail-coach of our great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-ship traced its line unbroken to Ulysses's lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall. Suddenly all was changed.
Well, one very hot day we seen Dave ridin' past into Mudgee, an' we knowed he'd have a spree in town that night, an' call at Mrs Hardwick's for sympathy comin' out next day; an' arter he'd been gone an hour or two, Tom Tarrant comes drivin' past on his mail-coach, an' drops some letters an' papers an' a bag o' groceries at our camp. Tom was a hard case.
But the grandest chapter of our experience within the whole mail-coach service was on those occasions when we went down from London with the news of victory.
Happiness might now be bought for a penny and carried in the waistcoat pocket; portable ecstacies might be had corked up in a pint-bottle; and peace of mind could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach. But if I talk in this way the reader will think I am laughing, and I can assure him that nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium.
Now and then a passing drover looks in at that lonely bar-room, where a high-shouldered bottle of Santa Cruz rum ogles with a peculiarly knowing air a shrivelled lemon on a shelf; now and then a farmer rides across country to talk crops and stock and take a friendly glass with Tobias; and now and then a circus caravan with speckled ponies, or a menagerie with a soggy elephant, halts under the swinging sign, on which there is a dim mail-coach with four phantomish horses driven by a portly gentleman whose head has been washed off by the rain.
His purpose was to stay a few months; he remained seventeen years. The first sight that greeted the newly arrived American in Liverpool was the mail-coach bringing the news of the battle of Waterloo. Irving's sympathies were with Napoleon.
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