DOWN THE ROAD 131 



eaten it that was their own look-out; it was there and 

 they must pay for it. At last, fearing the coach would 

 leave them behind, the Welshmen paid for the teas they 

 had not eaten, and were released. 



Miss Mitford, in Our Village, has left a vivid pen 

 picture of the discomforts to which coach travellers 

 were subje6l in times of extreme heat, or intense cold. 



"I shall never forget the plight in which we met the 

 coach one evening in last August, full an hour after its 

 time, steeds and driver, carriage and passengers, all one 

 dust. The outsides, and the horses, and the coachman, 

 all seemed reduced to a torpid quietness, the resignation 

 of despair. They had left off trying to better their 

 condition, and taken refuge in a wise and patient hope- 

 lessness, bent to endure in silence the extremity of ill. 

 The six insides, on the contrary, were still fighting 

 against their fate, vainly struggling to ameliorate their 

 hapless destiny. They were visibly grumbling at the 

 weather, scolding at the dust, and heating themselves 

 like a furnace, by striving against the heat. How well I 

 remember the fat gentleman without his coat, who was 

 wiping his forehead, heaving up his wig, and certainly 

 uttering that English ejaculation, which, to our national 

 reproach, is the phrase of our language best known on the 

 continent. And that poor boy, red-hot, all in a flame, 

 whose mamma, having divested her own person of all 

 superfluous apparel, was trying to relieve his sufferings 

 by the removal of his neckerchief — an operation which 

 he resisted with all his might. How perfeftly I remember 

 him, as well as the pale girl who sat opposite, fanning 

 herself with her bonnet into an absolute fever! They 

 vanished after a while in their own dust; but I have 

 them all before my eyes at this moment, a companion 



