of the old Exeter ‘Fly,’ and imagines a kind of Rip Van Winkle old gentleman, who had been a traveller by that crazy conveyance in 1742, waking up and journeying by the ‘Comet’ of 1836. Rousing from his long sleep, he determines to go by the ‘Fly’ to Exeter. In the lapse of ninety-four years, however, that vehicle has been relegated to the things that were, and has been utterly forgotten. He waits in Piccadilly. ‘What coach, your honour?’ asks a ruffianly-looking fellow.
‘I wish to go home to Exeter,’ replies the old gentleman.
‘Just in time, your honour, here she comes—them there gray horses; where’s your luggage?’
But the turn-out is so different from those our Rip Van Winkle knew, that he says, ‘Don’t be in a hurry, that’s a gentleman’s carriage.’
‘It ain’t, I tell you,’ replies the cad; ‘it’s the “Comet,” and you must be as quick as lightning.’ Whereupon, vehemently protesting, the ‘cad’ and a fellow ruffian shove him forcibly into the coach, despite his anxiety about his luggage.
The old fellow, impressed by the smartness of the Jehu—a smartness to which coachmen had been entire strangers in his time—asks, ‘What gentleman is going to drive us!’
‘He is no gentleman,’ replies the proprietor of the coach, who happens to be sitting at his side; ‘but he has been on the “Comet” ever since she started, and is a very steady young man.’
‘Pardon my ignorance,’ says our ancient, ‘from the cleanliness of his person, the neatness of his apparel, and the language he made use of, I mistook him for some enthusiastic bachelor of arts, wishing to become a charioteer after the manner of the illustrious ancients.’