NIMROD'S NORTHERN TOUR. 9 



I have not yet done with Watson and his coach. Observing- Mrs. 

 Watson, as she stood at the window, to cast an anxious look at her 

 husband as he was in the act of mounting his box, I was cogitating 

 within myself whether there might not be something in it that was 

 ominous, and looked for " the raven on the chimney's top," when 

 Watson himself thus dispelled the illusion. '' My Missis," said he, 

 '* will be anxious to see how I stand it this journey, for this is the first 

 day I have been at work for these last ten weeks. I have been laid up 

 with a bad leg from a scrape of the roller-bolt, and thought at one time 

 I was book'd by the down mail — at all events, that nothing but the knife 

 could have saved me." The mention of this circumstance, however, 

 might have been omitted by me here, had it not been associated with a 

 curious fatality that has attended some of our very best road coachmen 

 on their descending from a coach-box to a gig. During his sojourn in 

 London for the benefit of superior surgical assistance, Watson twice 

 took an airing in a gig, and was twice ran away with, and nearly killed. 

 I have, somewhere, but cannot now put my hand upon it, a list of 

 coachmen who have been killed out of gigs, the celebrated Dick 

 Vaughan, of the Cambridge Telegraph, at the head of them. 



At Rochester I took my leave of W^atson, very much pleased with all 

 I saw of his performance on the bench, as well as with his general 

 demeanour ; and we parted as we met, both strangers to each other. 

 The object of my leaving his'coach here was, to pay a visit to a favourite 

 sister whose husband is in command at Chatham, as well as one of the 

 Aid de Camps to the King ; and it happened that I arrived on a day on 

 which he had a very large party to dinner, of which there appeared to be 

 about an equal number of coats, red, black, and blue, dispersed amongst 

 the ladies, but all of them strangers to me. To dwell long on this dinner 



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