If in the days to which the old stage-coach belonged it never rained, it was never cold, one was never in a hurry, there were no missions of life and death to make one curse the delay of a moment--if one’s companions were always good-tempered, and one’s body was so constituted as to endure jerks and jolts and a sitting posture for hours at a stretch without inconvenience--then the old stage-coach may be conceived to have been a very agreeable means of locomotion. But as I have been informed by several elderly gentlemen that the weather forty years ago was pretty much the same sort of weather that it now is, that strokes of death and strokes of business requiring immense despatch happened then as they happen every day; in a word, that in most atmospherical, moral, and civic respects the early years of this century differed but very little from these its maturer days, I can only repeat, in spite of the protests of several venerable friends who seem to find most things (even whilst enjoying them) objectionable which are not as aged as themselves, that if we have one excuse better than another for being on good terms with the times we live in, it is because the picturesque old stage-coach makes no condition of our daily existence. Hanwitch was about fifty miles from London. To-day a traveller would be carried the distance in about an hour and three-quarters. Holdsworth, starting at half-past seven in the morning, would, providing that the coach did not break down or overturn, reach the town at about four o’clock in the afternoon. He awoke at half-past six, and at once rose. The morning was a bright one, but all the efforts of the sunshine to squeeze itself through the wire blinds and dusty panes of the coffee-room windows could not avail to communicate the faintest spark of cheerfulness to the dingy apartment, with its bare tables and blue-coloured looking-glass over the chimney, and the old-fashioned prints around the walls, suggestive, one knew not why, of London milk and discoloured blankets. The waiter came in, looking dejected, limp, and fluey, and perhaps to pay Holdsworth out for neglecting to leave word at the bar before going to bed, that he should want to breakfast at an unreasonable hour, declaimed a bill of fare, nearly every item of which, as Holdsworth named it, he declared could not possibly be got ready before half-past eight. Cold ham and tea must suffice, with which order the waiter sleepily withdrew, and after a long absence returned--when Holdsworth was on the point of starting up and leaving the house in the full belief that he should miss the coach--bearing a teapot of which the contents looked like rain-water, a loaf of bread as hard and slippery as glass under the knife, a lump of butter of the colour and perfume of soaked cheese, and a ham of which what was not bone was brine.