CHAPTER V.
COACH versus RAIL—DESCRIPTION OF A COACH JOURNEY FROM LONDON TO BATH—DIFFERENCES OF OPINION—THE COACH DINNER—LUXURIOUS LIVING—SNUG HÔTELLERIES—ENGLISH versus FOREIGN COOKING.
CHAPTER V.
"Every medal has its reverse." Many persons may be found who denounce coaching as an abomination; while others declare that railway travelling is most fatal only not to the lives, but to the comforts of Her Majesty's subjects. I pass over the dangers of the rail, and will lay before my readers the opinions expressed by the two contending parties. One declares that, among the many improvements of which this age has been productive—and many and vast have they been—that of travelling unquestionably bears the bell. The very word, however, has now become a misnomer. It is no longer travelling; it is flying over the country, luxuriously and triumphantly, at a pace that equals the hurricane.
The rapidity with which travellers are now conveyed by steam over the length and breadth of the country is a social advantage which, for manifold purposes, cannot be too much appreciated. Some may remember, and have not those suffered from, the old slow and sure system?
"This racks the joints,