32 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



bound to Exeter ; but none of them, I say, hoped to 

 reach it in three days. The lawyer indeed, who was a 

 great traveller, having made the journey three times in 

 his life, blew his frozen nose and publicly revelled in a 

 more moderate ideal. " If," he said, " in spite of high- 

 waymen, snowdrifts, ruts a yard deep, and Bagshot 

 Heath, we compass the 172 miles in six days, we may 

 think ourselves lucky, and may thank our stars, when we 

 are safe at The Swan at Exeter, that we are not wander- 

 ing among the bustards on Salisbury Plain." 



And so they rumbled and jolted along what is now 

 Piccadilly, till they got to what is now Apsley House ; 

 there the coachman alighted for a drink at the Hercules' 

 Pillars — the Hatchett's of the period — which stood where 

 Apsley House now stands. Readers of Tom Jones will 

 remember this Hercules' Pillars well, will fancy that they 

 have stayed in the place, as they can fancy that they 

 have stayed in every inn which Fielding has described. 

 Was it not here that Squire Western alighted on his 

 arrival in London in pursuit of the fair Sophia ? 

 Certainly it was ; and it was here that he cursed the 

 chairmen, who, true progenitors of our cabmen of to-day, 



asked him for another shilling. " D me," in point of 



fact, the immortal old gentleman exclaimed, " D me, 



if I don't walk in the rain rather than get into one of 

 their handbarrows again, They have jolted me more 

 in a mile than Brown Bess would in a fox chase." The 

 travellers in the Exeter Fly of 1773 did not regard The 

 Hercules' Pillars from the Squire Western point of view, 

 it is more than likely ; but they were thankful for its 

 light in the gray winter's morning ; and as they saw the 

 guard in the inn doorway somewhat ostentatiously getting 

 his blunderbuss under control, recollected that they were 

 near Knightsbridge, and experienced a qualm. 



Considering that Knightsbridge is only two furlongs 

 from Hyde Park Corner — measured to what was once 

 the cloth manufactory — this early perturbation of our 

 ancestors may seem strange ; but the truth is, that a 



