66 NEW DRAG 



Some dispute had taken place between the Proprietors of 

 the Kingston and Hampton coaches, and an old gentle- 

 man living at Cobham, in Surrey, who had been for a 

 long time connected with the Portsmouth and Chichester 

 coaches, had taken up the quarrel, and was determined, 

 as the phrase was, to run the other off the road. 



I had been out when, one evening, my father sent to 

 my lodgings in St. Martin's Lane, to ask me to go down 

 to Cobham with him on the Sunday morning. It was 

 Easter Sunday, the second anniversary of the one that 

 had already influenced my fortunes. My father drove 

 me down in his buggy. We dined with the disputatious 

 old gentleman, and partook of some of his excellent port. 

 The coachmaker from Guildford had brought the new 

 drag, which, with the four horses and harness, stood 

 already at the " White Lion," to which place we repaired 

 after dinner. After taking some more wine, the horses, 

 which had all been purchased indiscriminately but the 

 Friday preceding at the repository in Barbican, were put 

 to, when the owner, our host, said to me, — 



" You take hold of them : you know how to manage 

 them, I know, and I'll sit beside you." 



As the horses were all strangers to me, as well as 

 to one another, I did not vastly like the task. Being 

 eighty-three or eighty-four years old, this gentleman's 

 limbs were not so pliant as they had been. However, he 

 got up on the box, and we started on the road to 

 Kingston, his nephew — a man between thirty and forty — 

 the coachmaker, and a third person, occupying the roof, 

 the intended dragsman sitting behind, and my father 

 following in his buggy. 



