If a man has one good reason for being grateful for living in these times, it is because they are not coaching days.

The old stage-coach, the Wellerian coachman, the spruce guard with his horn and his jokes, the fat people inside, the gruff people outside, all contributed a picturesque detail to the age they belonged to; but I have generally found that the more picturesque an object is, the fitter it is to be surveyed at a distance only.

If in the days to which the old stage-coach belonged it never rained, it was never cold, one was never in a hurry, there were no missions of life and death to make one curse the delay of a moment—if one’s companions were always good-tempered, and one’s body was so constituted as to endure jerks and jolts and a sitting posture for hours at a stretch without inconvenience—then the old stage-coach may be conceived to have been a very agreeable means of locomotion. But as I have been informed by several elderly gentlemen that the weather forty years ago was pretty much the same sort of weather that it now is, that strokes of death and strokes of business requiring immense despatch happened then as they happen every day; in a word, that in most atmospherical, moral, and civic respects the early years of this century differed but very little from these its maturer days, I can only repeat, in spite of the protests of several venerable friends who seem to find most things (even whilst enjoying them) objectionable which are not as aged as themselves, that if we have one excuse better than another for being on good terms with the times we live in, it is because the picturesque old stage-coach makes no condition of our daily existence.

Hanwitch was about fifty miles from London. To-day a traveller would be carried the distance in about an hour and three-quarters. Holdsworth, starting at half-past seven in the morning, would, providing that the coach did not break down or overturn, reach the town at about four o’clock in the afternoon.

He awoke at half-past six, and at once rose. The morning was a bright one, but all the efforts of the sunshine to squeeze itself through the wire blinds and dusty panes of the coffee-room windows could not avail to communicate the faintest spark of cheerfulness to the dingy apartment, with its bare tables and blue-coloured looking-glass over the chimney, and the old-fashioned prints around the walls, suggestive, one knew not why, of London milk and discoloured blankets.

The waiter came in, looking dejected, limp, and fluey, and perhaps to pay Holdsworth out for neglecting to leave word at the bar before going to bed, that he should want to breakfast at an unreasonable hour, declaimed a bill of fare, nearly every item of which, as Holdsworth named it, he declared could not possibly be got ready before half-past eight. Cold ham and tea must suffice, with which order the waiter sleepily withdrew, and after a long absence returned—when Holdsworth was on the point of starting up and leaving the house in the full belief that he should miss the coach—bearing a teapot of which the contents looked like rain-water, a loaf of bread as hard and slippery as glass under the knife, a lump of butter of the colour and perfume of soaked cheese, and a ham of which what was not bone was brine.

Very lightly breaking his fast with these things, Holdsworth called for his bill, and obtaining the services of the Boots to carry his portmanteau, which was all the baggage he had brought with him from Australia, walked to the house from which the Canterbury coach started.

It wanted but ten minutes of the starting-time, but no coach was visible. However, it was up the yard, and would be brought round in a few minutes, the book-keeper said. As these few minutes threatened to expand into half an hour, Holdsworth entered the bar of the “Canterbury Arms” to obtain a biscuit and some brandy-and-water, partly to complete the wretched breakfast he had made, and partly to exterminate the vile flavour of the tea that lingered in his mouth.

When he returned, the coach was out, the horses were in, several passengers were getting into, or climbing on top of, the vehicle; the coachman, muffled about the throat as though the month were November, and the air full of snow, stood on the pavement, smoking a cigar and surveying the whole picture with a lordly and commanding, though a somewhat inflamed eye; and the busy scene was completed by a body of boys and men offering newspapers, walking-sticks, knives, combs, and broad sheets of songs to the passengers, and striving to drown each other’s importunities with loud and ceaseless clamour.

Off went the coach at last, with Holdsworth by the coachman’s side. The wheels rattled over the hard roads, the houses in long lines swept by, lost by degrees their frowsy exteriors and dingy metropolitan aspects, and attempted little revelations of bucolic life in small gardens, with glimpses of trees in the rear. Then came houses standing alone in grounds of their own, cottages purely pastoral in appearance, with the noise of farmyards about them, and their atmosphere sweetened by the smell of hay and flowers. These dropped away, the breeze grew pure and elastic, the country opened in wide spaces of waving cornfields spotted with bright poppies, and swelling meadow lands and green fields shaded by groups of trees, with here and there a lark whistling in the blue sky, and all London lying behind, marking its mighty presence by a haze that seemed to stretch for miles and miles, and paled the heavens to the hue of its own complexion.

Holdsworth was such bad company that the coachman soon ceased his “observations” touching the different scenes through which they passed, and addressed himself to his companion on the right, a young gentleman who was going as far as Chatham, and who lighted several large cigars in less than half an hour, pulling at them with hollows in his cheeks, and looking at the ash of them, and preserving a very pale face. Holdsworth had something else to think about than the coachman’s refined and classical remarks, delivered from the depth of three shawls. The quick rolling of the coach over the smooth turnpike-road was inducing an exhilaration that acted upon him as good wine acts upon the brain, giving clearness and freedom to thought, and causing life to be felt at her most secret sources. There was the impression in his mind that he had once before travelled on the top of a stage-coach along this very road, though when, or under what circumstances, or whether he had actually performed the journey or had read of some one else having done it, he could not tell. The scenery they were travelling through was altogether delicious, and better than a cordial to a man who had just landed from a three and a half months’ voyage at sea. The aspect of the country was full of that sober sweetness of general effect which soothes the heart with a deep sense of home; of broad yellow tracts burnished by the sunshine, of the delicate shadowing of green, and the neutral tint of fallow soil; houses made as dainty by distance as pictures on ivory; great trees spreading their broad abundant leaves over cool spaces of gleaming water; with the animation, now and again, of human life, where men worked in the fields, or where children sported before the houses, stopping their frolics to cheer the coach, while women held babies high in their hands and swayed to the delighted plunging of the chubby limbs.

Holdsworth, however, was by no means a sample of the “outsides” carried by the coach, whatever the deportment of the invisible “insides” might have been. There were some half-a-dozen people on the roof, including two girls, one of whom was decidedly pretty and the other decidedly coquettish. These young ladies, at the first going off, had been ceaseless in the expression of their fears that, though it was true they were up all right, they should never be able to get down again. A gentleman with a turn-up nose, expressive of the utmost self-complacency, had taken it upon himself to comfort the ladies, by remarking that getting down was in every case easier than getting up, because the natural tendency of the human body was to fall; at which the ladies had murmured “Impertinence!” and “Some people are better seen than heard,” and such-like scathing phrases, thereby sanctioning the display of such wit as the turn-up-nosed gentleman possessed, which he exerted with such good effect that the ladies grew crimson under uncontrollable fits of laughter. Then the guard struck in, and provoked the other outsiders to talk; and presently a large flat bottle was handed around, which had the effect of making everybody who put it to his or her lips merrier still. Onwards rattled the coach with its noisy, laughing burden, flinging sounds of life broadcast over the green country, provoking many a pair of slow bucolic eyes to stare it gravely out of sight, raising clouds of dust as the wheels went softly over the floury highway, spinning under mile-lengths of trees darkening the road with twinkling shadows, and throbbing with the piercing shrilling of innumerable birds buried in the dense foliage, catching the hot sunshine again in the open, and gleaming like a gigantic looking-glass as it sped gaily forward under the broad eye of Heaven.

It was two o’clock when they changed horses for the second time at a smart little Kentish town, with a gray ruin right in its midst, and an old church hard by it, with one of the snuggest of rectories peeping at the world out of the silence and shadow of a rich orchard. Some of the “insides” got out here and went their ways, and were no more seen. The young ladies on the roof were entreated to alight by the small-nosed man, but this they noisily refused to do, the mere idea of such a thing causing them to catch hold of each other. The delay, however, was a short one. The jaded horses, with streaks of white foam upon their polished hides, were taken out and fresh ones put in; the coachman, smelling strongly of gin and peppermint, climbed into his place, cracked his whip, and off started the coach, followed by a crowd of excited boys, who chased it clear of the town and then threw stones after it.

“Where might you be for, sir?” inquired the coachman of Holdsworth, speaking out of his stomach like a ventriloquist.

“Hanwitch.”

“Several stoppages afore Hanwitch,” said the coachman.

“How many?”

“Vy, there’s Saltwell, Halton, Gadstone, and Southbourne.”

“Southbourne?”

“Yes, Southbourne, of course. That’s the willage jist afore Hanwitch.”

“Southbourne! Southbourne!” repeated Holdsworth, with the old look of bewilderment that invariably entered his face when some familiar name was sounded in his ear.

The coachman glanced at him over his shawls, and said to himself, quite in the pit of his stomach. “You’re a rum ’un, you are!”

“P’raps you ar’n’t acquainted with the road, sir?” said he.

“I think—I am sure I know Southbourne,” replied Holdsworth. “What sort of place is it?”

“Vot sort o’ place? Vy, a willage.”

“But what kind of village?”

“All that I know is this, there’s a hinn there vere they serves you vith werry good liquor. Blow’d if I can tell you anything furder. But that’s my veakness, sir. Vould you believe me, I’ve drove coaches through that willage for the last two-and-twenty year, and may I be bil’d if I can tell you anything about it.”

Holdsworth sank into deep thought, while the coachman, twisting his eyes over his shawls, examined his face and clothes with side-long attention; then his curiosity being evidently aroused by something in Holdsworth’s appearance which widely differed from the cut and style of the passengers he was in the habit of carrying, he said:

“Might you be a furriner, sir?”

“No,” answered Holdsworth.

“I’ve a brother in Californy. P’raps you might know them parts, sir?”

“I have just returned from Australia.”

“Oh!” exclaimed the coachman, looking staggered; “that’s a good vays off ain’t it?”

“The other side of the world.”

“Gor bless me! A queer place, I’ve heerd. Full of conwicks. One of our guards was sent out there t’other day for abstracting of money from a wallis.”

This reference operating upon his sympathies, he entered into a story, as long as a newspaper account, of the trial; “how beautiful the counsill as hadvocated the pore fellow spoke, vich the court vos crowded vith coachmen, who groaned venhever the hadvocate as vos opposed to the guard began to speak, vich behaviour, though it warn’t p’raps quite correck, vasn’t to be stopped nohows, although the judge looks werry fierce, and the counsill kep’ on sayin’, ‘My lud, if this here noise ain’t stopped, I’ll throw the case up,’ vich was just the thing the coachmen vanted” (here he made as though he would poke Holdsworth in the ribs with the butt-end of his whip); “but, lor’ save yer, it was no go.”

Holdsworth paid no attention to this story, his mind being engaged in a desperate struggle with memory. Indeed, the word “Southbourne” had affected him as no other allusion had. Pale, dim phantoms of memory, comparable to nothing so much as the phosphorescent outlines which the eye may mark fluctuating in the black sea-water, rose and sank in his mind; and though whispering nothing to his breathless anxiety, clearly proving that the faculty which he had long believed dead was beginning to stir and awaken.

One by one the towns and villages named by the coachman had been passed, and now Southbourne was to come.

An indescribable anxiety, at once breathless and thrilling, suspending, it seemed to him, the very pulsations of his heart, making his breath come and go in quick, fierce respirations, possessed Holdsworth.

He held his hands tightly clasped; all colour had fled from his face, and his deep-sunk eyes glowed with unnatural fire.

Repeatedly he muttered to himself, “What does this portend?”

Already his prophetic soul had caught the light, and seemed to know herself, and maddened him and wrung his frame with her wild and bitter struggles to proclaim her inspiration and pierce her reflected beam through the film that still blinded the eye of the mind.

The sun was still high, and flung its yellow brilliance over the fair and gilded prospect. The coach had turned the corner of the long road that led straight as an arrow into Southbourne; and far away at the extremity, in mingled shadow and shine, the few houses could be seen, with the spire of St. George’s Church rearing high its flaming vane, and on the left the gleam of the river shadowed by many trees.

“There’s Southbourne!” said the coachman, pointing with his whip.

The dust whirled in a cloud behind the wheels, the guard sounded his horn, and with a rush and a rattle the coach drew up opposite the “Hare and Hounds,” a tavern as familiar to Holdsworth as the sight of his own hand.

“Hullo!” cried the coachman. “Hi, you there! Help! A glass o’ brandy! Blowed if the gentleman hasn’t fainted!”

“Fainted!” cried the young ladies on the top of the coach, leaning forward to catch a sight of his face.

No, not fainted; but struck down by a revelation such as, had the two young ladies and the small-nosed man and the coachman been told the story of it, would have supplied them with enough matter to keep them talking without intermission as long as the coach-wheels turned.

Memory, coming out of the little house at the bottom of the long familiar thoroughfare, out of the little house that turned its shoulder upon the highway and parted it into lanes, had rushed upon him like an armed man, and struck him a staggering blow. He had dropped under it, and, but for the support of the apron over his knees, would have fallen to the ground.

The guard ran into the tavern and returned with a glass of brandy, which the coachman put to Holdsworth’s lips.

“Thank you, I am better now,” he exclaimed.

“Glad to hear it,” said the coachman.

“I will get down here.”

“Aren’t you booked for Hanwitch!” exclaimed the guard, who imagined that the gentleman’s head wandered.

“No—this will do—I will go no further. Help me with your hand—thank you.”

He reached the ground, watched by a group of persons who made a movement as though to support him, when they saw him swaying to and fro like a drunken man, and staring fixedly down the road. But in a moment or two, with a struggle, he stood firm. His portmanteau was handed out and carried into the bar. The guard took his place; the coachman, with a glance over his shawls to see that Holdsworth stood clear of the wheels, jerked the reins, and the coach rattled out of sight.