CHAPTER IV.
A GLASS COACH.—MISS WILLING (EN GRAND COSTUME)
NEXT day our friend Billy was buried in looking after his lost luggage and burnishing up the gilt bugle-horn buttons of the coat, waist-coat, and shorts of the Royal Epping Archers, in which he meant to figure in the evening. Having, through the medium of his “Boyle,” ascertained the rank of the owner of the residence where he was going to be regaled, he ordered a glass-coach—not a coach made of glass, juvenile readers, in which we could see a gentleman disparting himself like a gold-fish in a glass bowl, but a better sort of hackney coach with a less filthy driver, which, by a “beautiful fiction” of the times, used to be considered the hirer’s “private carriage.”
It was not the “thing” in those days to drive up to a gentleman’s door in a public conveyance, and doing the magnificent was very expensive: for the glass fiction involved a pair of gaunt raw-boned horses, which, with the napless-hatted drab-turned-up-with-grease-coated-coachman, left very little change out of a sovereign. How thankful we ought to be to railways and Mr. Fitzroy for being able to cut about openly at the rate of sixpence a mile. The first great man who drove up St. James’s Street at high tide in a Hansom, deserves to have his portrait painted at the public expense, for he opened the door of common sense and utility.
What a follow-my-leader-world it is! People all took to street cabs simultaneously, just as they did to walking in the Park on a Sunday when Count D’Orsay set up his “‘andsomest ombrella in de vorld,” being no longer able to keep a horse. But we are getting into recent times instead of attending Mr. Pringle to his party. He is supposed to have ordered his glass phenomenon.
Now Mr. Forage, the job-master, in Lamb’s Conduit Street, with whom our friend did his magnificence, “performed funerals” also, as his yard-doors indicated, and being rather “full,” or more properly speaking, empty, he acted upon the principle of all coaches being black in the dark, and sent a mourning one, so there was a striking contrast between the gaiety of the Royal Epping Archers’ uniform—pea-green coat with a blue collar, salmon-coloured vest and shorts—in which Mr. Pringle was attired, and the gravity of the vehicle that conveyed him. However, our lover was so intent upon taking care of his pumps, for the fog had made the flags both slippery and greasy, that he popped in without noticing the peculiarity, and his stuttering knock-knee’d hobble-de-hoy, yclept “Paul,” having closed the door and mounted up behind, they were presently jingling away to the west, Billy putting up first one leg and then the other on to the opposite seat to admire his white-gauze-silk-encased calves by the gas and chemists’ windows as they passed. So he went fingering and feeling at his legs, and pulling and hauling at his coat,—for the Epping Archer uniform had got rather tight, and, moreover, had been made on the George-the-Fourth principle, of not being easily got into—along Oxford Street, through Hanover Square, and up Brook Street, to the spacious region that contained the object of his adoration. The coach presently drew up at a stately Italian-column porticoed mansion: down goes Paul, but before he gets half through his meditated knock, the door opens suddenly in his face, and he is confronted by Big Ben in the full livery,—we beg pardon,—uniform of the Delacey family, beetroot-coloured coat, with cherry-coloured vest and shorts, the whole elaborately bedizened with gold-lace.
