Happy is the man who can pass through life in this easy, reins-on-the-neck sort of way, not suffering a slight imposition to mar the general pleasure of his journey! Returning from the metropolis, the country innkeeper had the advantage of having his bill contrasted with a London one--an ordeal that none but a real land shark would wish to shrink from. A comparison of inn charges throughout England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, for the same style of entertainment, would be curious if not instructive. They would show (what, however, almost every other line of life shows) that one often pays double for nearly the same thing by going to different places for it. Take a bottle of soda-water, for instance. Walk into a large, fashionable hotel, and desire the waiter to bring you one. You drink it, and ask, "What's to pay?" "A shilling, if you please, Sir," (or ninepence--which is the same thing), waiters at large hotels never having any coppers. If you were to go to the next chemist's you would get it for fourpence--very likely of the same quality. But the great impositions were, after all, the charges for wax-lights and breakfasts. Gas has now superseded the former, but breakfasts were and are still charged too high. "Breakfast, with eggs and bacon, three shillings and sixpence," was and is the charge at fashionable hotels; at less pretentious ones you may get the same for two shillings, or at most half-a-crown. CHAPTER XIV. NOBLE AND GENTLE DRAGSMEN--JOURNEY TO NEWMARKET--LORD GRANTLEY'S TEAM--A REFRACTORY WHEELER--USE AND ABUSE OF THE BEARING REIN--THE RUNNING REIN--HARNESS OF THE PRESENT DAY--THE ROYAL MAIL--GENERAL REMARKS ON DRIVING. CHAPTER XIV. Among the amateur knights of the whip of bygone days, though still remembered by many of the present generation, may be mentioned the late Duke of Beaufort, the Earls of Chesterfield and Harborough, Lords Poltimore, Grantley, and Suffield, Colonel the Honourable Lincoln Stanhope, the Honourable Fitzroy Stanhope, Sir St. Vincent Cotton, Sir Henry Peyton, Captains Angerstein and Tollemache. The head of the Somerset family was a very steady dragsman, and knew his business well. He was a less showy coachman than Lord Chesterfield; but his Grace had the qualification of making each horse do his quantum of work. Lord Chesterfield, had he possessed a little more steadiness, would have been scarcely inferior to Stevenson, of the Brighton "Age;" but his exuberant, buoyant spirits ran away with him sometimes; he would lark, and the "old gentleman" himself could not have stopped him. His drag was as well appointed as the Duke's, and looked coaching all over, without a spice of slang, the prevailing error of many amateurs of that day.