Very lightly breaking his fast with these things, Holdsworth called for his bill, and obtaining the services of the Boots to carry his portmanteau, which was all the baggage he had brought with him from Australia, walked to the house from which the Canterbury coach started. It wanted but ten minutes of the starting-time, but no coach was visible. However, it was up the yard, and would be brought round in a few minutes, the book-keeper said. As these few minutes threatened to expand into half an hour, Holdsworth entered the bar of the “Canterbury Arms” to obtain a biscuit and some brandy-and-water, partly to complete the wretched breakfast he had made, and partly to exterminate the vile flavour of the tea that lingered in his mouth. When he returned, the coach was out, the horses were in, several passengers were getting into, or climbing on top of, the vehicle; the coachman, muffled about the throat as though the month were November, and the air full of snow, stood on the pavement, smoking a cigar and surveying the whole picture with a lordly and commanding, though a somewhat inflamed eye; and the busy scene was completed by a body of boys and men offering newspapers, walking-sticks, knives, combs, and broad sheets of songs to the passengers, and striving to drown each other’s importunities with loud and ceaseless clamour. Off went the coach at last, with Holdsworth by the coachman’s side. The wheels rattled over the hard roads, the houses in long lines swept by, lost by degrees their frowsy exteriors and dingy metropolitan aspects, and attempted little revelations of bucolic life in small gardens, with glimpses of trees in the rear. Then came houses standing alone in grounds of their own, cottages purely pastoral in appearance, with the noise of farmyards about them, and their atmosphere sweetened by the smell of hay and flowers. These dropped away, the breeze grew pure and elastic, the country opened in wide spaces of waving cornfields spotted with bright poppies, and swelling meadow lands and green fields shaded by groups of trees, with here and there a lark whistling in the blue sky, and all London lying behind, marking its mighty presence by a haze that seemed to stretch for miles and miles, and paled the heavens to the hue of its own complexion.