“The run to Reading,” I learn from a cycling paper, “constitutes a pleasant morning’s spin from London.” I should like to call up one of our great-grandfathers who travelled these thirty-nine miles painfully by coach, and read that paragraph to him.

Reading numbers over 60,000 inhabitants, and is rapidly adding to them. This prosperity proceeds from several causes, Reading being—

“’Mongst other things, so widely known,
For biscuits, seeds, and sauce.”

The town, of course, stands for biscuits in the minds of most people, and the names of Huntley and Palmer have become household words, somewhat eclipsing Cock’s Reading Sauce, and the seeds of Sutton’s; while few people outside Reading are cognizant of its great engineering industries. So much for modern Reading, whose principal hero is George Palmer.

Mr. George Palmer, whose death occurred in 1897, enjoyed the distinction of having a statue erected to him during his lifetime, an unusual honour which he shared with few others—Queen Victoria, the great Duke of Wellington, Lord Roberts, Reginald, Earl of Devon, and, of course, Mr. Gladstone. Mr. Palmer’s fellow-townsmen elected to honour him in this way, and decided to have a statue which should be in every way true to life, and show the man “in his habit as he lived”—one in which the clothes should be as characteristic as the features. Our grandfathers would have represented him wrapped in a Roman toga, but those notions do not commend themselves to the present age, and so the effigy stands in all the supremely un-decorative guise of everyday dress: homely coat, and trousers excruciatingly baggy at the knees; bareheaded, and in one hand a silk hat and an unfolded umbrella. This is possibly the only instance in which these last necessary, but unlovely articles have been reproduced in bronze.

Ancient Reading knew nothing of biscuits or sauces. It was the home of one of the very greatest Abbeys in England. The Abbot of Reading ranked next after those of Westminster and Glastonbury, and usually held important offices of State. In the Abbey, Parliaments have been held, Royal marriages celebrated, and Kings and Queens laid to rest. Yet of all this grandeur no shred is left. There are ruins; but, formless and featureless as they are, they cannot recall to the eye anything of the architectural glories of the past, and the bones of the Kings have for centuries been scattered no man knows whither.

There are pleasant stories of Reading, and gruesome ones. Horrible was the fate of Hugh Faringdon, the last Abbot, who was, in 1539, with one of his monks, hanged, drawn and quartered for denying the religious supremacy of that royal wild beast, Henry the Eighth. The King had been friendly with him not so long before, and had presented him with a silver cup, as a token of this friendship.

One wonders if this unfortunate prelate was the same person as that Abbot of Reading mentioned by Fuller. The Abbot of that story was a man particularly fond of what have been gracefully termed the “pleasures of the table.” His eyes, as the Psalmist puts it, “swelled out with fatness,”—and his stomach, too, for that matter. To him came one day a hungry stranger, fresh from the appetizing sport of hunting. He had lost his way, and craved the hospitality of the Abbey. That hospitality was extended to him, promptly enough, and he was seated at the Abbot’s own table.

It will readily be guessed that this hungry stranger was the King. He had wandered thus far, away from Windsor Forest and his attendants, and was genuinely famished. The Abbot, however, had no notion who he was; but he could see that this strayed huntsman was a very prince among good trencher-men, and envied him accordingly. “Well fare thy heart,” said he, as he saw the roast beef disappearing; “I would give an hundred pounds could I feed so lustily on beef as you do. Alas! my weak and squeezie stomach will hardly digest the wing of a small rabbit or chicken.”

The King took the compliment and more beef, and, pledging his host, departed. Some weeks after, when the Abbot had quite forgotten all about the matter, he was sent for, clapped into the Tower, and kept, a miserable prisoner—not knowing what his offence might be, or what would befall him next—on bread and water. At length one day a sirloin of beef was placed before him, and he made such short work of it as to prove to the King, who was secretly watching him, that his treatment for “squeezie stomach” had succeeded admirably; so, springing out of the cupboard in which he had secreted himself, “My lord,” says he, “deposit presently your hundred pounds in gold, or else you go not hence all the days of your life. I have been your physician to cure you, and here, as I deserve, I demand my fee for the same.”

The Abbot was enlightened. He, as Fuller says, “down with his dust, and, glad he escaped so, returned to Reading, as somewhat lighter in purse, so much more merry in heart, than when he came thence.”

Little remains at Reading to tell of the coaching age. Where are the “Bear,” the “George,” the “Crown”? Gone, with their jovial guests, into the limbo of forgotten things, almost as thoroughly as the civilization of Roman Calleva—the Silchester of modern times—situated at some distance down the road from Reading to Basingstoke, and whose relics may be seen gathered together in the Reading Museum. To that collection should be added a set of articles used in the everyday business of coaching. They would be just as curious to-day as those Roman potsherds of a thousand years ago.

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