The determination to keep awake was heroic, but without avail. Even the screaming and grumbling of the skid and the straining of the wheels down Spitalgate Hill into Grantham did not suffice to quite waken us. But what that noise and the jarring of the wheels failed to do, the stoppage at the “George” at Grantham and the sudden quiet do succeed in. Our friend the moon has by now sunk to rest, and a pallid dawn has come; someone remarks that it is past three o’clock in the morning, and someone else is wakened and hauled forth from amid the snoring insides, whose snores become gasps and gulps, and then resolve themselves into the yawns and peevish exclamations of tired men. The person thus awakened proves to be a passenger who had booked to Colsterworth, which is a little village we have now left eight miles behind us. He had been asleep, and as Colsterworth is not one of our stopping or changing places, the guard forgot all about him until the change at Grantham. The passenger and the guard are now waging a furious war of words on the resounding pavements of the sleeping town. It seems that the unfortunate inside, besides being himself carried so far beyond his destination, has a heavy portmanteau in the like predicament. If he had been a little bigger and the guard a little smaller, his fury would perhaps make him fall upon that official and personally chastise him. As it is, he resorts to abuse. Windows of surrounding houses now begin to be thrown up, and nightcapped heads to inquire “what the d——l’s the matter, and if it can’t be settled somewhere else or at some more convenient season?” The guard says “This ’ere gent wot’s abusing of me like a blooming pickpocket goes to sleep and gets kerried past where he wants to get out, and when I pulls him out, ’stead of taking ’im him on to Newark or York, ’e——” “Shut up,” exclaims a fierce voice from above: “can’t a man get a wink of sleep for you fellows?”
So, the change being put to, the altercation is concluded in undertones, and we roll off; the irate passenger to bed at the “George,” vowing he will get a legal remedy against the proprietors of the “Wellington” for the unheard-of outrage.
At Newark, a hundred and twenty-five miles of our journey performed, it is broad daylight as the coach rolls, making the echoes resound, into the great market-square. Clock-faces—a little blanched and debauched-looking to our fancy—proclaim the hour to be 5.30 a.m. The change is waiting for us in front of the “Saracen’s Head,” and so is our new coachman. The old one leaves us, but before doing so “kicks us”—as the expressive phraseology of the road has it—for the usual fees. He has been, so far as we remember him, a dour, silent, unsociable man, but we think that, perhaps, as we have been asleep during the best part of his reign on the box-seat, any qualities he may possess have not had their due opportunity, and so he gets two shillings from ourselves. A passenger behind us gives him a shilling, which he promptly spits on and turns, “for luck” as he says, and “in ’opes it’ll grow.” The passenger who gave it him says, thereupon—in a broad Scots accent—that he is “an impudent fellow, and desairves to get nothing at all;” to which the jarvey rejoins that he has in his time brought many a Scotchman from Scotland, but, “this is the fust time, blow me, that hever I see one agoin’ back!”—which is a very dark and mysterious saying. What did he mean?
Our new coachman is a complete change from our late Jehu. He is a spruce, cheerful fellow, neat and well brushed, youthful and prepossessing. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he says cheerily: “another fine day.” We had not noticed it. All we had observed was of each other, and that as every other looked pale, wearied and heavy-eyed, so we rightly judged must be our own condition.
“Chk!” says our youthful charioteer to his horses, and away they bound. Newark market-square glides by, and we are crossing the Trent, over a long bridge. “Newark Castle, gentlemen,” says our coachman, jerking his whip to the left hand; and there we see, rising from the banks of the broad river, the crumbling, time-stained towers of a ruined mediæval fortress. Much he has to say of it, for he is intelligent beyond the ordinary run. A good and graceful whip, too—one of the new school: much persuasion and little punishment for the horses, who certainly seem to put forward their best paces at his merest suggestion. It is a good, flat, and fairly straight road, this ten-mile stage to Scarthing Moor. We cross the Trent again, then a low-lying tract of water-meadows, where the night mists still cling in ghost-like wisps to the grass, and then several small villages. “This”—says our coachman, pointing to a church beside the road, and down the street of one of these little villages—“this is where Oliver Cromwell came from.”
“What is the name of it?” we ask, knowing that, whatever its name, the Protector came from quite a different place.
“Cromwell,” he says.
So this was probably the original seat of that family many centuries before Oliver came into the world, which has since then been so greatly exercised about him.
“Blow up for the change,” says the coachman to the guard, as, having passed through Carlton-on-Trent, Sutton-on-Trent, and round the awkward bend of the road at Weston, we approach Scarthing Moor and the “Black Bull.” “They’re a sleepy lot at the ‘Bull,’” he says, in explanation. The guard produces the “yard of tin” from the horn-basket, and sounds a melodious tantara: quite unnecessarily, after all, it seems, for, quite a distance off, the ostler, dressed after his kind in trousers and shirt only, with braces dangling about him, is seen standing in the road, with the change ready and waiting.
“Got up before you found yourself, this morning?” asks the coachman.