Appearing to be informed with an idea, he laid down his plane (for it was a plane he was at work with), pushed up his spectacles again, and came to the door.
‘Would a po-shay do for you?’ he asked.
‘I am not sure that I understand what you mean.’
‘Would a po-shay,’ said the coachmaker, standing close before me, and folding his arms in the manner of a cross-examining counsel—‘would a po-shay meet the views you have expressed? Yes, or no?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you keep straight along down there till you see one. You’ll see one if you go fur enough.’
With that, he turned me by the shoulder in the direction I was to take, and went in and resumed his work against a background of leaves and grapes. For, although he was a soured man and a discontented, his workshop was that agreeable mixture of town and country, street and garden, which is often to be seen in a small English town.
I went the way he had turned me, and I came to the Beer-shop with the sign of The First and Last, and was out of the town on the old London road. I came to the Turnpike, and I found it, in its silent way, eloquent respecting the change that had fallen on the road. The Turnpike-house was all overgrown with ivy; and the Turnpike-keeper, unable to get a living out of the tolls, plied the trade of a cobbler. Not only that, but his wife sold ginger-beer, and, in the very window of espial through which the Toll-takers of old times used with awe to behold the grand London coaches coming on at a gallop, exhibited for sale little barber’s-poles of sweetstuff in a sticky lantern.
The political economy of the master of the turnpike thus expressed itself.
‘How goes turnpike business, master?’ said I to him, as he sat in his little porch, repairing a shoe.