“Another person had come in whilst we were away, and the landlady had told him about the girl running off and my being taken prisoner. This person was an attorney’s clerk, and he took up my cause earnestly, and advised me to prosecute the constable for a false imprisonment, he was giving me that advice when the constable returned. I pretended to entertain the project, and when the official became aware of the subject on which we were deliberating, he became very uneasy, and seemed almost willing to make any compromise rather than be under the clutches of the other ‘limb of the law.’ At length, after I had sufficiently tormented him, I agreed to a settlement, the terms of which were that he should pay for a quantity of ale, I and the attorney’s clerk, whom I found to be a queer, ironical fellow, agreeing to pay for as much to come in after his was drunk.
“We had sat here rather a considerable time, and had got into high good humour with each other and the liquor, when the sounds of voices and a fiddle were heard approaching the house, and in a minute after in walked the girl we had prisoner in the morning, arm in arm with a young fellow, who, by his speech and dress, we recognised as the one with the patched face; in short, they were the two runaways, followed by some half a dozen young men, two young women, and an elderly person fiddling. They had been at church and had got wed, the banns having been published there some months before. They were now all ready for dancing, singing, and mirth; I scarcely ever saw a set of happier-looking countenances; the lad was in raptures; the bride seemed to have more self-command than any in the place. She thanked me most gratefully for the kindly feelings I had evinced; her husband joined her, and I found it of no use offering to break up from the wedding party. The constable was quite reconciled, as the charge, he said, would be taken off the township, and the ratepayers would deem it no bad day’s work of his. The attorney offered his friendly services in reconciling the squire’s coachman to the match, and the landlady brought in a posset of spiced ale for the wedding feast. The fiddler rosined his bow afresh, and played up a jig that set all the lads a-capering. In short, we ate and drank and danced the afternoon away. Evening followed, night came, and then the noon of night; and the last scenes I committed to memory were the fiddler falling from his chair and smashing his viol, and the attorney painting the constable’s face delicately with a blacking-brush whilst the latter person was fast asleep.
THE HAUGHTY HOSTELRY
“The next morning I was at Newport Pagnell at an early hour. The place had a most romantic appearance as I approached it. There must have been heavy rains upwards, for the Ouse had overflowed its banks, and numerous cattle were grazing on small green islets surrounded by the flood. The weather continued all that a foot traveller could wish, and I walked on leisurely, enjoying the cooling breeze, the odour of flowers, and the music of birds some six or eight miles until I arrived at the celebrated village of Woburn, where I stepped into the first public-house I came to on the left-hand side—I think it was the sign of the ‘Bedford Arms.’ The place seemed very fine, and the people I saw moving about looked, I thought, in a strange supercilious way at me; none of them stopped to ask what I wanted. At length I desired a woman to bring me a glass of ale, intending it as a preliminary to breakfast. She did not pause a moment to receive my order, but looking down, swept past me. ‘Bless us,’ I thought, ‘what sort of a public-house have I got into now?’ No one attended to me, and soon after I asked again for a glass of ale; this servant also went away without speaking, but in a short time a female of a superior appearance came and said they did not entertain foot travellers. I expressed my surprise at that, and assured her I was both able and willing to pay for whatever I called for. She said she did not doubt it, but it was an invariable rule of the house not to serve persons travelling on foot, and the rule could not be departed from. Could I not have a draught of ale? I asked. No, foot travellers could not have anything there. I accordingly rose, and replacing my bundle on my shoulder, I begged her to inform her employer that the rule of the house might bring trouble and humiliation sometime, inasmuch as, if other engagements did not press me, I would go before the nearest magistrate or the Duke of Bedford himself, and prefer a complaint against the occupier for refusing to entertain a traveller without sufficient cause. She smiled at my law (as well she might, having scanned my appearance, and thence formed an opinion of my purse), and said there were other places in the village where I might have whatever refreshment I wanted; and then, probably thinking she had wasted time enough on me, she turned and walked off, and I came out of that inhospitable and pride-infected place. At another inn I met with a reception the very reverse of the first; the people, both landlord and servants, were very obliging and attentive. I made a good breakfast, rested, chatted, and received an invitation to call there again if I came that way.
“I wonder whether the people of the Duke’s Arms are yet in business? and if they are, whether, like scores of their arrogant brotherhood, they have not been so far humbled by those great levellers, the railways, that if a wayfaring man now enters their house he can have a cup of ale for money?
JOURNEY ENDED
“I walked to Redbourn to dinner, which consisted of a plain but delicious repast at a very humble pothouse. Here I remarked a horseshoe nailed inside the weather board of the door, and on my pretending ignorance of its purpose, and asking what it was for, an old wrinkled dame, seemingly the mother of the household, told me with perfect seriousness that it was to keep all witches and bewitched persons and things out of the place, and that so long as it remained there nothing under the influence of witchcraft could enter.
“At St. Albans I walked amid the ruins of the Old Abbey, having previously passed a fragment of a wall in the meadows below, undoubtedly a part of the remains of the British city of Verulam. I lingered rather long with these scenes, and it was getting dark when I passed the Obelisk at Barnet, where the famous battle was fought in the Wars of the Roses. Every step I advanced to-day, the people, their houses, and their manners, became more Londonish; and it will not then appear surprising that at the first public-house I went into I was made welcome to comfortable quarters, and so remained there during the night. The next morning I walked into London, and took my breakfast at a coffee-house.”
XI
Islington is but a mile and a quarter from the General Post Office. Even eighty years ago it was only semi-rural. London, in fact, is really after all a slow-moving monster, and although there are, here and there, instances of swift extension, the Great City enlarges itself as a rule with elephantine deliberation. At Islington, in the heyday of the coaching era, you first experienced the sensation of being on the road to anywhere in particular; for there, on Islington Green, stood the first turnpike gates. On the hither side was London: once through them, and you were definitely in the country. As the [illustration] shows, characteristically urban streets of houses had then begun to appear, but the cocks and hens and the drove of sheep in the road present a rural appearance, and in the distance the church seems to stand amid rustic bowers.