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Updated: June 19, 2025
Mary from the London road as it runs by the lodge at Fairoaks, and seeing the rapid and shining Brawl winding down from the town and skirting the woods of Clavering Park, and the ancient church tower and peaked roofs of the houses rising up amongst trees and old walls, behind which swells a fair background of sunshiny hills that stretch from Clavering westwards towards the sea the place looks so cheery and comfortable that many a traveller's heart must have yearned towards it from the coach-top, and he must have thought that it was in such a calm friendly nook he would like to shelter at the end of life's struggle.
I remember these poor people standing in the market in those dark days of famine, having their bits of furniture for sale on the streets, and there were none to buy. I have heard the wailing of men, women and children on the coach-top day after day, when these fortunate unfortunates were escaping from their native land forever.
So, as I was saying, I sat on the coach-top twisting my gloves, and I wished in my heart that men would not do such things as that very agreeable gentleman was doing. I do not design to enter on a crusade against tobacco. It is a mooted point in minor morals, in which every one must judge for himself; but I do wish men would not smoke so much.
We were going now at a gallop, and from my perch I could see the yellow light of the lamps on the sweating necks of the leaders. There was a company of sailors with me on the coach-top smoking, talking, and shouting. Once or twice one of them would address a word or two to me, but got scanty answers. I was looking intently along the road for a sign of Colliver's carriage.
True, O driver! and thrice that morning you stopped to change horses, and thrice with knightly grace you helped me down from the coach-top, gentle-handed and smooth of brow and tongue, as if no storm had ever lowered on that brow or muttered on that tongue, and thrice I went into the village inns and brooded over the hospitable stoves, and dried my dripping garments; and when once your voice rang through the hostelrie, while yet I was enveloped in clouds of steam, did not the good young woman seize her sizzling flat-iron from the stove, and iron me out on her big table, so that I went not only dry and comfortable, but smooth, uncreased, and respectable, forth into the outer world again?
And then we disembarked and posted ourselves on the coach-top for a six-mile ride to Champlain; and Grande said, her face still buried in the map, "Here on the left is 'Trout Brook' running into the lake, and a cross on it, and 'Lt. Howe fell, 1758. That is worth seeing." "Yes," I said, "America loved his brother."
I remembered this, and how I stretched out my hands to the place from the coach-top; and how at Reading, where we stopped, I spent the two shillings that I possessed in a cocoanut and a bright clasp-knife; and how, when I opened it, the nut was sour; and how I cried myself to sleep, and woke in London.
'Let's treat the driver, cried Jonas. 'If you think it won't hurt the man, or render him discontented with his station certainly, faltered Mr Pecksniff. Jonas only laughed at this, and getting down from the coach-top with great alacrity, cut a cumbersome kind of caper in the road.
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