NEJVAL4N /rr WniTCIfURCH 127 



Wliitclmrcli, two miles down the road, is ap- 

 proached past the much-quarried hills that rise on 

 tlie right hand and shelter that decayed little town 

 from the buffetings of the north-easterly winds. If 

 there be those who are curious to learn what a decayed 

 old coaching town is like, let them journey to Whit- 

 church. After much tiresome railway travelling, and 

 changing at junctions, they will arrive in the fulness 

 of time at Whitchurch station, whence the omnibus 

 of the ' White Hart ' will drive them, rumbling over 

 the stone-pitched streets of the town, to the door of 

 that quaint inn, in one of whose rooms the future 

 Cardinal Newman w^rote the beginning of the Lyra 

 Apostolica : — 



Are these the tracks of sonic unearthly friend 1 



2nd December 1832, while waiting for the mail to 

 Falmouth. He had come from Oxford that mornino- 

 by the Oxford-Southampton coach. 



' Here I am,' he says, writing to his mother, ' from 

 one till eleven,' waiting for the down Exeter mail. 

 Think, modern railway traveller, what would you say 

 were it your lot to wait ten hours, say at Temple- 

 combe Junction, for a connection ! Moreover, a bore 

 claiming to be the brother of an acquaintance claimed 

 to share his room and his society at the ' White 

 Hart,' and eventually journeyed to Exeter with him. 

 The future Cardinal did not like this. He writes : ' I 

 am practising for the first time the duty of a traveller, 

 which is sorely against the grain, and have been 

 talkative and agreeable without end,' adding (one can 

 almost imaoine the sio-h of the retirinsj scholar I), ' Now 



