1M ROADS" AND TRAVELLING I'AKT III. 



heaviest part of the charge was for living and lodging 

 on the road, not to mention the fees to guards and drivers. 

 The style in which the journey was performed mav he 

 inferred from the circumstance that on one occasion, 

 when a quarrel took place between the guard and a pas- 

 senger, the coach stopped to see them fight it out on the 

 road. Though the Dover road was still one of the best 

 in the kingdom, the Dover flying-machine, carrying only 

 four passengers, 'took a long summer's day to perform 

 the journey. It set out from Dover at four o'clock in 

 the morning, breakfasted at the Red Lion, Canterbury, 

 and the passengers ate their way up to town at various 

 inns on the road, arriving in London in time for supper. 

 Smollett complained of the innkeepers along this route 

 as the greatest set of extortioners in England. 



What a ride by coach was in those days has been so 

 well described by a Prussian clergyman, Mr. Charles H. 

 Moritz, that we cannot do better than give his account of 

 one from Leicester to Northampton, and from thence to 

 London. The journey was made in the year 1782 : 



" Being obliged," he says, " to bestir myself to get back to 

 London, as the time grew near wben the Hamburgh captain with 

 whom I intended to return had fixed his departure, I determined to 

 take a place as far as Northampton on the outside. But this ride 

 from Leicester to Northampton I shall remember as long as I live. 



" The coach drove from the yard through a part of the house. 

 The inside passengers got in from the yard, but we on the outside 

 were obliged to clamber up in the street, because we should have 

 had no room for our heads to pass under the gateway. My com- 

 panions on the top of the coach were a farmer, a young man very 

 decently dressed, and a black-a-moor. The getting up alone was 

 at the risk of one's life, and when I was up I was obliged to sit 

 just at the corner of the coach, with nothing to hold by but a sort 

 of little handle fastened on the side. I sat nearest the wheel, and 

 the moment that we set off I fancied that I saw certain death before 

 me. All I could do was to take still tighter hold of the handle, 

 and to be strictly careful to preserve my balance. The machine 

 rolled along with prodigious rapidity over the stones through the 

 town, and every moment we seemed to fly into the air, so much so 



