LADY FOXHUNTERS 273 



or three hours in the day, 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" was 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 augument against 

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

 used to travel that road when it\v3.s/ar n'orse." Squire Stick- 

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

 mud's grandson, who is always in a stew — always in motion 



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