“Very sorry, sir; ‘Royal Sovereigns’ very hungry to-day; very good appetites they had, sir; wonder they left even the bones.”
“You’re laughing at me, you rascal; bring another chicken!”
“No more chickens, sir; roast lamb, would the lady like? hot or cold; green peas, new potatoes?” ...
“Your apple tart, sir. Ale, sir. Claret, ma’am.” ...
Dinner disposed of, the coach is ready, but one of our passengers is missing. Has any one seen him? He went off, it seems, to see the cathedral, instead of having dinner. Fortunately for himself he comes hurrying up just as we are starting, and the guard hauls him up to his outside place by main force.
“Tip us a tune,” says the coachman to the guard, who, rendered sentimental by the steak and the bottle of stout he had for dinner in the bar, in company with the buxom barmaid, responds with “Believe me, if all those Endearing Young Charms,” as we pass the frowning portal of Bootham Bar and bump along the very rough street of Clifton, York’s modern suburb.
This is a thirteen-and-a-half mile stage from York to Easingwold; but although long, it is an easy one for the horses, if the coachman does not demand pace of them, on account of the dead level of the road. He very wisely lets them take their own speed, only now and then shaking the reins when they seem inclined to slacken from their steady trot. It is a lonely stretch of country, treeless, flat, melancholy; and the appearance of Easingwold is welcomed. At the “Rose and Crown” the new team is put in, and off we go again, the ten miles to Thirsk. At Northallerton the horses are changed for a fresh team at the “Golden Lion,” and the fat coachman, assisted down with almost as much trouble as he was hoisted up, resigns the ribbons into the hands of another.
The usual knot of sightseers of the little town are gathered about the inn to witness the one event of the day, the arrival of the London coach. Among them one perceives the coachman out of a place; a beggar out at elbows; three recruits with ribbons in their hats, not quite recovered from last night’s drink, and stupidly wondering how the ribbons got there; the “coachman wot is to take the next stage”; several errand boys wasting their masters’ time; and a horsey youth with small fortune but large expectations, who is the idler of the place—the local man about town. There is absolutely nothing else for the inhabitants of Northallerton to do for amusement but to watch the coaches, the post-chaises and the chariots as they pass along the one long and empty street.
Our box-seat passenger leaves us here. Although he has, all the way down, shown himself anxious to be intimate with the successive coachmen, and has paid pretty heavily for the privilege of occupying that seat of honour, it has been of no sporting advantage to him, for he is only a Cockney tradesman, who has never even driven a trap, let alone four-in-hand. So when each whip in turn asked him the questions, conventional among whips, “whether he had his driving-gloves on, and would like to take the ribbons for the next few miles,” he evaded the offer by “not being in form,” or not knowing the road, or something else equally annoying to the coachman, who, in not having an amateur of driving on the box, thereby missed the canonical tip of anything from seven shillings to half a sovereign which the handling of the reins for twenty miles or so was worth to the ordinary sportsman.
Our new coachman, on our starting from Northallerton, keeps the seat beside him vacant. He says he has a passenger for it down the road. Tom Layfield, for that is the name of our present charioteer, works the “Wellington” up and down between this and Newcastle on alternate days, Ralph Soulsby being the coachman on the other. Tom Layfield is a very prim-looking, tall and spare man, tutor in coachmanship to many gentlemen on these last fifty-five miles; and it does not surprise some of us when, passing Great Smeaton, we are hailed by a very “down the road” looking young man, whose hat is cocked at a knowing angle, and whose entire get-up, from the gigantic mother-o’-pearl buttons on his light overcoat to the big scarf-pin in the semblance of a galloping coach and horses, proclaims “amateur coachman.” It is the young squire of Hornby Grange, on the right hand, we are told, who is anxious to graduate in coaching honours, and to be mentioned in the pages of the Sporting Magazine by Nimrod, in company with Sir St. Vincent Cotton, the Brackenburys, and other distinguished ornaments of the bench.