With what ease, rapidity, and comfort we now perform our journeys, is best shown by contrast with the way in which our grandfathers thought wonders were performed. On a cold day in winter, your hands were frozen, your feet were frozen, your very mouth felt frozen; and, in fact, you felt frozen all over. Sometimes, with all this cold, you were also wet through—your hat wet through; your coat wet through; the lame wrapper that was meant to keep your neck warm and dry, wet through; and you felt wet through to your very bones. Only twenty minutes was allowed for dinner; and by the time you had got your hands warm enough to be able to untie your neck-wrapper, and had got out of your greatcoat, which, being wet, clung most tenaciously to you, the time for dinner was half-gone. Before you had eaten one quarter of what you could have consumed, if your mouth had been in eating trim, and if your hands had been warm enough to handle your knife and fork, the coachman would put in his head and say: ‘Now, gentlemen, if you please; the coach is ready.’ After this summons, having struggled into your wet greatcoat, bound your miserable wet wrapper round your miserably cold neck, having paid your half-crown for the dinner you had the will but not the time to eat, with sixpence for the waiter, you wished your worthy host good-bye, grudging him the half-crown he had pocketed for your miserable dinner. You then again mounted your seat, to be rained and snowed on, and almost frozen to death before you reached your journey’s end.
The following is from Notes and Queries, August 1856: ‘There being persons who seriously lament the good old time of coaches, when they could travel leisurely and securely, see the country, and converse with the natives, it may be well to register some of the miseries before they are altogether effaced from the memory.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
It is certainly not desirable that the good of coaches should be interred with their bones; neither is it by any means to be wished that the evil should entirely cease to live after them, so as to render us indifferent, and thankless, and insensible to the superior advantages of modern locomotion. (1) Although your place has been contingently secured days before, and you have risen with the lark, yet you see the ponderous vehicle arrive full, full, full; and this, not unlikely, more than once. (2) At the end of a stage, beholding the four panting, reeking, foamy animals, which have dragged you twelve miles; and the stiff, galled, scraggy relay, crawling and limping out of the yard. (3) Being politely requested, at the foot of a tremendous hill, to ease the horses, by getting out and walking. (4) An outside passenger resolving to endure no longer the pelting of the pitiless storm, takes refuge inside, to your consternation, with dripping hat, saturated cloak, and soaked umbrella. (5) Set down with a promiscuous party to a meal, bearing no resemblance to that of a good hotel save in the charge; and no time to enjoy it. (6) Closely packed in the coach, “cabined, cribbed, confined” with five companions morally or physically obnoxious, for two or three comfortless days and nights. (7) During a halt, overhearing the coarse language of the hostlers and tipplers at the roadside pothouse; and besieged by beggars exposing their mutilations. (8) Roused from your nocturnal slumber by the horn or bugle, the lashing and cracking of whip, a search for parcels under your seat, and solicitous drivers. (9) Discovering at a diverging point in your journey that the other coach you wished to take runs only every other day, or has finally stopped. (10) Clambering from the wheel to your elevated seat by various iron projections. (11) After threading the narrowest streets of an ancient town, entering the innyard by a low gateway, requiring great care to escape decapitation. (12) Seeing the luggage piled up “Olympus high,” so as to occasion an alarming oscillation. (13) Having the reins and whip placed in your unpractised hands, while coachee indulges in a glass and a chat. (14) When dangling at the extremity of a seat, overcome with drowsiness. (15) Exposed to piercing draughts, owing to a refractory glass; or, vice versâ, being in a minority, you are compelled, for the sake of ventilation, to thrust your umbrella accidentally through a pane. (16) At various seasons, suffocated with dust and broiled by a powerful sun; or cowering under an umbrella in a drenching rain; or petrified by cold; or torn by fierce winds; or struggling through snow; or wending your way through perilous floods. (17) Perceiving that a young squire is receiving an initiatory practical lesson in the art of driving, or that a jibing horse or a race with an opposition coach is endangering your existence. (18) Losing the enjoyment or employment of much precious time, not only on the road but also from consequent fatigue. (19) Interrupted before the termination of your hurried meal by your two rough-coated, big-buttoned, many-caped friends, the coachman and guard, who hope you will remember them.’
No doubt these olden times had their delights as well as discomforts, and old coachmen still speak enthusiastically of the charm of a bright moonlight night in summer-time, in which, not marred by the beat of the horses’ feet or the rumble of the wheels, you heard sounds, saw sights, and felt conscious of perfumes that are unknown to railway travellers. Yes, though many may greatly regret that steam has superseded horse-flesh, that the grimy engine-driver and stoker have displaced the coachman, that the discordant, screeching whistle is heard instead of the long mellow horn, the balance is in our favour, in spite of all the annoyances to which we are subjected by the stupidity and carelessness of railway officials, or by the red-tapeism and apparent indifference of railway directors.
IN ALL SHADES.
CHAPTER XXVII.
On the morning when Harry Noel was to arrive in Trinidad, Mr Dupuy and Edward Hawthorn both came down early to the landing-stage to await the steamer. Mr Dupuy condescended to nod in a distant manner to the young judge—he had never forgiven him that monstrous decision in the case of Delgado versus Dupuy—and to ask chillily whether he was expecting friends from England.
‘No,’ Edward Hawthorn answered with a bow as cold as Mr Dupuy’s own. ‘I have come down to meet an old English friend of mine, a Mr Noel, whom I knew very well at Cambridge and in London, but who’s coming at present only from Barbadoes.’