This was when the bashful man, as related in the "first branch" of _The Holly Tree_, starts on his journey to the Holly Tree Inn. "There was no Northern Railway at that time," he says, "and in its place there were stage-coaches; which I occasionally find myself, in common with some other people, affecting to lament now, but which everybody dreaded as a very serious penance then. I had secured the box seat on the fastest of these, and my business in Fleet Street was to get into a cab with my portmanteau, so to make the best of my way to the Peacock at Islington, where I was to join this coach.... When I got to the Peacock, where I found everybody drinking hot purl, in self-preservation, I asked if there were an inside seat to spare. I then discovered that, inside or out, I was the only passenger. This gave me a still livelier idea of the great inclemency of the weather, since that coach always loaded particularly well. However, I took a little purl (which I found uncommonly good), and got into the coach. When I was seated they built me up with straw to the waist, and, conscious of making a rather ridiculous appearance, I began my journey. It was still dark when we left the Peacock." [Illustration: THE PEACOCK, ISLINGTON _From an old Engraving_] A reference to the same inn is made in "Tom Brown's Schooldays," when Tom and his father stayed the night there in order to catch the "Tally-Ho" coach for Rugby the next morning. There is still a reminder of the old Peacock at 11 High Street, where a sign-board announces the date of its establishment in 1564, and a relic of the coaching days may be seen in the form of an iron hook upon a lamp-post opposite, to which horses were temporarily tethered. Following Nicholas's coach on its journey north we find it passing through the counties of Hertford and Bedford in bitterly and intensely cold weather. In due course it arrived at Eton Slocombe, where a halt was made for a good coach dinner, of which all passengers partook, "while the five little boys were put to thaw by the fire, and regaled with sandwiches." Mr. Squeers, it may be noted in passing, had, in the interim, alighted at almost every stage to refresh himself, leaving his charges on the top of the coach to content themselves with what was left of their breakfast. Eton Slocombe is Dickens's thinly disguised name for Eaton Socon, a picturesque little village of one straggling street in Huntingdonshire. He does not mention the inn by name, but it may be rightly assumed that it was the White Horse, an attractive old road-side coaching-house, which, in those days, was the posting inn for the mail and other coaches passing through the county. In later years it became the favourite resort of the North Road Cycling Club, and witnessed the beginning and ending of many a road race in the "'eighties" and "'nineties," and is, no doubt, a welcome place of call for motorists to-day.