6 THE EXETER ROAD 



streets, though their purses were well crammed with 

 louis d'or. When they wanted to go to bed, they 

 yawned to the chambermaid, or shut their eyes ; 

 when hunger attacked, they pointed to their mouths. 

 Even pretty Miss K., and Miss G., realised not the 

 distortion of their labial muscles, but cawed like 

 unfledged birds for food. They paid whatever the 

 French demanded, and were laughed at (not before 

 their faces, indeed) most immeasurably. And yet 

 simpletons of this class spent near £100,000 last 

 year in France. 



' But to return. A rich citizen in London, a gentle- 

 man of large fortune eastwards, has, perhaps, some 

 very valuable relations or friends in the West. Half 

 a dozen times in his lifetime he hears of their welfare 

 by the post, and once, perhaps, receives a token when 

 the Western curate posts up to town to be initiated 

 into a benefice — and that is all. He thinks no more of 

 visiting them than of traversing the deserts of Nuliia, 

 considering them as a sort of separate beings, which 

 might as well be in the moon, or in Lvinho Pat rum. 



' I hear the nobility and gentry of Somersetshire 

 have exerted a laudable spirit, and are now actually 

 erecting turnpikes, which will give that fruitful 

 county a better intercourse with its neighbours, and 

 ])ring an accession of wealth into it ; for every wise 

 traveller who goes from London to Exeter, etc. will 

 surely take Bath in his way (as the digression is a 

 mere nothing). At least, all the expensive people 

 with coaches certainly will — and then the supine 

 inhabitants of Wilts and Dorset may repine in vain ; 

 for when a road once comes into repute, and persons 



