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"We went down on hired omnibuses to the cemetery ever so far into the country, six of the best boys in each class, and I was on the box seat next to the driver, and I thought of the old mail-coach days and looked out for highwaymen.
A little lower down the street, a mail-coach is starting for Windsor, and ten or fifteen men are assembled doing their utmost, and twenty or thirty boys helping them, to look at the passengers, but are unexpectedly relieved from their arduous duty by a military band at the head of a marching regiment. Give me the bar though.
The hackney-coach-and cab-men, along whose lines they passed, could not make him out at all. Some thought he was a mail-coach guard riding post with the bags; but as the light was pretty strong he trotted on regardless of observation. Here the Yorkshireman would fain have persuaded Mr. Jorrocks to desist from his quixotic undertaking, but he turned a deaf ear to his entreaties.
Not to trifle with an intelligent public, I will state at once that, in the early part of this century, Greenton was a point at which the mail-coach on the Great Northern Route stopped to change horses and allow the passengers to dine.
Another month had passed, and the end of August had nearly come, when Mr Haredale stood alone in the mail-coach office at Bristol. Although but a few weeks had intervened since his conversation with Edward Chester and his niece, in the locksmith's house, and he had made no change, in the mean time, in his accustomed style of dress, his appearance was greatly altered.
The man who had secured that seat was supposed to know something about the world, and to be such a one that the passengers sitting behind him would be proud to be allowed to talk to him. But the prestige of the position was greater than the comfort. A night on the box of a mail-coach was but a bad time, and a night inside a mail-coach was a night in purgatory.
He was not of those Sybaritic buyers who sit in their offices while agents and dealers do the work. 'On hearing of a curious book he has been known to put himself into the mail-coach, and travel three, four, or five hundred miles to obtain it, fearful to trust his commission to a letter. He knew the solid comfort to be had in reading a book catalogue.
And now another sound the rumbling of wheels as the mail-coach, outward bound, rolls heavily off the pavements and splashes through the mud and water of the road. All night long the poor passengers will be tossed to and fro between drowsy watch and troubled sleep, and will dream of their own quiet beds and awake to find themselves still jolting onward.
There was once on a time a gardener's wife, who longed to have a son more than a man in a fever for cold water, or the innkeeper for the arrival of the mail-coach. It chanced one day that the poor man went to the mountain to get a faggot, and when he came home and opened it he found a pretty little serpent among the twigs.
'Wow! says Tom, with a jump, clapping his hand on the part, and rubbing it, 'by this and that, you drew the blood out o' me, says Tom; 'you wicked divil tish! go along! says he, making a kick at her. With that the cat gave a reproachful look at him, and her eyes glared just like a pair of mail-coach lamps in a fog.
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