The moon now rides in unsullied glory through the azure sky. We top Alconbury Hill at a few minutes to twelve, and come to the junction of the Old North and the Great North Roads. Everything stands out as clearly as if it were daylight, but with a certain ghost-like and uncanny effect. “The obelisk,” as the coachmen have learned to call the great milestone at the junction of the roads (it is really a square pedestal) looks particularly spectral, but is not the airy nothing it seems—as the coachman on the Edinburgh Mail discovered, a little while ago. The guard tells us all about it. The usual thing. Too much to drink at the hospitable bar of the “George,” at Huntingdon, and a doubt as to which of the two milestones he saw, on coming up the road, was the real one. The guard and all the outsides were in similar case—it was Christmas, and men made merry—and so there was nothing for it but to try their quality. Unfortunately, he drove into the real stone, and not its spectral duplicate, conjured up by the effects of strong liquors. We see the broken railings and the dismounted stone ball that once capped the thing as we pass. The local surgeon mended the resultant broken limbs at the “Wheatsheaf,” whose lighted windows fall into our wake as we commence the descent of Stonegate Hill.
Stilton. By this time we are too drowsy to note whether we changed at the “Bell” or at its rival, directly opposite, the “Angel.” At any rate, nobody asks us if we would not like a nice real Stilton cheese to take with us, as they usually do: it is midnight.
We now pass Norman Cross, and come in another eight miles to Wansford turnpike, where the gate is closed and the pikeman gone to bed. “Blow up for the gate,” said the coachman, when we were drawing near, to the guard, who blew his horn accordingly; but it does not seem to have disturbed the dreams of the janitor. “Gate, gate!” cry the guard and coachman in stentorian chorus. The guard himself descends, and blows a furious series of blasts in the doorway, while the coachman lashes the casement windows.
THE TURNPIKE GATE. From a contemporary lithograph.
At last a shuffling and fumbling are heard within, and the door is opened. The pikeman has not been to bed after all; he was, and is, only drunk, and had fallen into a sottish sleep. He now opens the gate, in the midst of much disinterested advice from both our officials—the guard advising him to stick to Old Tom and leave brandy alone, and the coachman pointing out that the Mail will be down presently and that he had better leave the gate open if he does not wish to present the Postmaster-General with forty shillings, that being the penalty to which a pike-keeper is liable who does not leave a clear passage for His Majesty’s Mails.
We now cross Wansford Bridge, a very long and narrow stone structure over the river Nene. Having done so, slowly and with caution, we know no more: sleep descends insensibly upon us.
... Immeasurable æons of time pass by. We are floating with rhythmic wings in the pure ether of some unterrestrial paradise. Our gross earthly integument (twelve stone and a few extra pounds avoirdupois of flesh and blood and bone) has fallen away. We want nothing to eat, for ever and ever, and have left everything gross and unspiritual far, far below us, and ... a fearful crash! Convulsively, instinctively, our arms are thrown out, and we awake, tenaciously grasping one another. What is this that has brought us down to earth again and made us unwillingly assume once more that corporeal hundredweight, or thereabouts, we had left so gladly behind? Are we overturned?
No; it was nothing: nothing, that is to say, but the hunchbacked bridge over the river Welland, that leads from Stamford Baron into Stamford Town. It is only the customary bump and lurch, the guard informs us. May all architects of hunchback bridges be converted from straight-backed human beings into bowed and crooked likenesses of their own abominable creations! We will keep awake, lest another such rude awaking await us.
With this intent we gaze, wide-eyed, upon Stamford Town, its noble buildings wrapped round in midnight quiet, the moon shining here full upon the mullioned stone windows of some ancient mansion, there casting impenetrable black shadows, making dark mysteries of grand architectural doorways decorated with curious scutcheons and overhung with heavy pediments, like beetling eyebrows. Grand churches whose spires soar away, away far into the sky, astonish our newly-awakened vision as the coachman carefully guides the coach through the narrow and crooked streets, in which the shadows from cornices and roof-tops lie so black and sharp that none but he who has driven here before could surely bring this coach safely through. Once or twice we have quailed as he has driven straight at some solid wall, and have breathed again when it has proved to be only some oblique monstrous silhouetted image cast athwart the way. Fear only leaves us when we are clear of the town and once more on the unobstructed road; then only is there leisure for the mind to dwell upon the beauties of that glorious old stone-built town. We are thus ruminating when, between Great Casterton and Stretton, where we enter Rutlandshire, the glaring lamps of a swiftly approaching coach lurch forward out of the long perspective of road, and, with a clatter of harness and a sharp crunching of wheels, fall away, as in a vision. The guard, answering someone’s question, says it is the Leeds “Rockingham,” due in London at something after ten in the morning.