98 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



It went round at a very different pace though in 

 another fifty years, when the dashing young Mirabel 

 of 1 77 1 was a septuagenarian with the gout and grand- 

 children, and the guard of the crazy old Exeter Fly was 

 practising on a ghostly horn by the banks of the Styx, 

 and the coachman cracking empty jokes with pale, un- 

 substantial highwaymen destined never to cry '' Stand 

 and deliver" any more. Let us skip fifty years, I say, 

 and imagine our Mirabel an old man of seventy, a 

 stranger to reforms in coaching, and in 1823 making 

 the same journey to Exeter again ! The great and 

 ingenious Nimrod has described such a scene with such 

 extreme facetiousness and point, that I may well take 

 a leaf from his book, T/ze Chase^ The Tiirf^ and the 

 Road {MuYYdiY, 1852), with many acknowledgments and 

 thanks. 



Full of scepticism, then, but guided by a friend, our 

 Mirabel of the Exeter Fly takes his stand outside The 

 Gloucester Coffee-house, now the St. James's Hotel, on 

 a winter's morning near Christmas 1823. His life since 

 he married Belinda has been passed out of England in 

 the great new w^orld beyond the sea, and he has come 

 back to see his grandchildren and the old home in the 

 west country before the allotted time arrives for him 

 to leave off travelling for ever. Behold him then with 

 much of 1773 about him in dress, deportment, and 

 speech, set down suddenly in Piccadilly. The street is 

 crowded. Bucks about to travel are hurrying into The 

 White Horse Cellar for a last rum and milk, or lolling 

 outside the doors attired somewhat after the manner of 

 our more modern masher, but having broader shoulders, 

 curlier hats, longer hair dressed a la George the Fourth, 

 parted behind, and distilling the subtle odours of 

 Macassar the Incomparable to the morning air. They 

 stare at the old-fashioned cut of the once fashionable 

 Mirabel's clothes with fatuous incredulit}', over cravats 

 a la Brummell half-a-yard high. The newest things in 

 the way of exclamations are abroad ; " zounds " have 



