A journey by coach to anywhere, in the time of this book, was an achievement more or less significant. Men made their wills before their departure. They were in the right. What are the risks of the rail as compared with the risks of the road? You have the collision. In the good old times you had the masked highwayman with the loaded pistols, and the horrible threat; you had the deep ditch into which the great lumbering coach, in some transport of downhill manœuvring, was overset. You had lanes of mud, in which all got out and shoved; you had the dangers of long exposure to the air, so that when you finally arrived you were nearly dead with some affection of the chest.
Some hundreds of miles away from London, measurable now in a day by steam, in those times in about a week, stood a little village of the hard Cornwall grey stone that makes Penzance, in spite of its architecture, picturesque. The village was on the coast, distant about two miles from the sea, and was pretty with many little gardens, and remarkable in its air of genial originality; as though, having grown so far afield, it had borrowed its prejudices nowhere. A village inn fronted the high road. It swung the sign of 'Nelson.' Nelson was still much in the public mind in those days. A stoutly built fellow in a lazy, lounging walk, came to the door, and, looking up the road, said to some one within—
'What makes the coach late?'
'They time themselves out o' greediness, and can't keep their word!' exclaimed a female voice.
Now, as this was said, a noise of distant thunder was heard, and lo! the coach, at hard gallop, turned the corner, the guard bugling, and the foam flaking from the horses' mouths. It rattled up, with all the fine effect of those glistening, grandly handled vehicles, to the door of the 'Nelson,' and stopped, the horses blowing smoke, and one white female face, prim in a Quaker's bonnet, staring through an inside window.
There was a single traveller on top of the coach. He had his cloak rolled well around him, and descended with the movements of a half-frozen man. He asked for something to eat and drink, and was shown into a parlour where, with as little loss of time as possible, they served him handsomely with chops and potatoes and excellent beer. He then produced a pipe, and sat with his feet to the fire. On the entrance of the landlord to remove the dishes, Captain Jackman said languidly—
'Can I have a bed in your house?'
'Yes, sir.'
'I am here to visit a man named Thomas Bruton. Do you know him?'
'Well, I've known Tom half my life.'