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Romance of Travel; Comprising Tales of Five Lands
Romance of Travel Comprising Tales of Five Lands Author:Nathaniel Parker Willis General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1840 Original Publisher: S. Colman Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can selec... more »t from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: ROMANCE OF TRAVEL. STRATFORD-ON-AVON. " One-p'un'-five outside, sir, two pun' in." It was a bright, calm afternoon in September, promising nothing but a morrow of sunshine and autumn, when I stepped in at the "White-Horse cellar," in Piccadilly, to take my place in the Tantivy coach for Stratford-on-Avon. Preferring the outside of the coach, at least by as much as the difference in the prices, and accustomed from long habit to pay dearest for that which most pleased me, I wrote myself down for the outside, and deposited my two pound in the horny palm of the old ex-coachman, retired from the box, and playing clerk in this dingy den of parcels and portmanteaus. Supposing my buisness concluded, stood a minute speculating on the weather-beaten, cramp-handed old Jehu before me, and trying to reconcile his ideas of "retirement from office" with those of his almost next door neighbour, the hero of Strathfieldsaye. He was at least as "soft a gentleman" to look at as the duke; but compare his -crammed and noisesome cellar with the lordly parks and spacious domains of a king's bounty! Yet for the mere courage of the man, there are exigencies in the life of a coachman that require as much as might have served his grace at Waterloo. The broad rimmed beaver set knowingly on the ex-Jehu's forehead, forebade a comparison between their sculls. I had mounted the first stair toward daylight, when a touch on the shoulder with the end of a long whip -- a technical "reminder," which probably came easier to the old driver than the phrasing of a sentence to a "gemman "-recalled me to the cell...« less