288 THE HUNTING FIELD 



grinding up and down by the Serpentine, or, what is 

 worse, hurrying from house to house, changing from 

 hot rooms to cold air, and from cold air to hot rooms 

 — carved ivory card-case in hand, making what they 

 call "calls." Surely this system of cold-catching 

 must have been invented by the doctors for the 

 purpose of procuring patients. No wonder dashing 

 ladies think so little of their poor horses and servants 

 shivering in the cold and night air when they are so 

 regardless of themselves. 



It is said that caricatures contain in a manner the 

 history of the times, and much such an observation 

 may be applied to inn and public-house signs. What 

 should we have thought fifteen or twenty years ago of 

 the sign of the Railway Tavern or the " Locomotive 

 Inn" depicted, with its hissing engine, and a long 

 train of railway carriages after it, and yet it has 

 become quite common, superseding our ancient friend 

 the pack-horse. "The pack-horse" w^as eminently 

 characteristic of the times, speaking, as plainly as 

 words can speak, of heavy bottomless roads and 

 slow progress. The unspeakable badness of the 

 roads in former times may perhaps have been one 

 reason for the fewness of carriages that were kept in 

 comparison with what are kept in the present day, 

 for formerly travelling was a real matter of slavish 

 drudgery, and we are not surprised at our forefathers 

 staying at home, or at our foremothers being able to 

 spin, pickle, and preserve. 



People who were past horse exercise had scarcely 

 any alternative but staying at home, unless they 

 tacked all the lumbering long-tailed cart-horses to 

 the old family tub, and ploughed their way to the 

 next town, furnishing subsequent lazy road-surveyors 

 with the favourite argument against improvement, 

 that "Squire Stick-in-the-mud's coach and four used 

 to travel that road when it was far worse." Squire 

 Stick-in-the-mud was never in a hurry, not so Squire 



