If you did not put in an appearance, the deposit was, of course, forfeited. Dickens, who as a reporter in his early years was very intimately acquainted with coach travelling and all the manners and customs connected with it, has left a very picturesque description of a coach booking-office and its occupants. The first impression received by the prospective traveller was of his own unimportance. One entered a mouldy-looking room, ornamented with large posting-bills, the greater part of the place enclosed behind a huge lumbering rough counter, and fitted up with recesses like the dens of the smaller animals in a travelling menagerie, without the bars. At these booking-offices, in fact, one booked parcels as well as passengers, and into these recesses the parcels were flung, with an air of recklessness at which the passenger who might have chanced to buy a new carpet-bag that morning would feel considerably annoyed. The booking-office to which Dickens here refers was at the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross; but booking-offices were all very much alike, and were exceedingly dreary and uncomfortable places, resembling modern offices for the reception of parcels:-- “Porters, like so many Atlases, keep rushing in and out, with large packages on their shoulders; and while you are waiting to make the necessary inquiries, you wonder what on earth the booking-office clerks can have been before they were booking-office clerks; one of them, with his pen behind his ear, and his hands behind him, is standing in front of the fire like a full-length portrait of Napoleon; the other, with his hat half off his head, enters the passengers’ names in the books with a coolness which is inexpressibly provoking; and the villain whistles--actually whistles--while a man asks him what the fare is outside--all the way to Holyhead!--in frosty weather too! They are clearly an isolated race, evidently possessing no sympathies or feelings in common with the rest of mankind. Your turn comes at last, and, having paid the fare, you tremblingly inquire--‘What time will it be necessary for me to be here in the morning?’ ‘Six o’clock,’ replies the whistler, carelessly pitching the sovereign you have just parted with into a wooden bowl on the desk. ‘Rather before than arter,’ adds the man with the semi-roasted unmentionables, with just as much ease and complacency as if the whole world got out of bed at five. You turn into the street, ruminating, as you bend your steps homewards, on the extent to which men become hardened in cruelty by custom.”