“‘Take off the cloths, Bob,’ says the coachman, who now appears for the first time, in a rough blue greatcoat, of which the buttons behind are so far apart that you can’t see them both at the same time. ‘Now, gen’l’m’n!’ cries the guard, with the waybill in his hand. ‘Five minutes behind time already!’ Up jump the passengers--the two young men smoking like limekilns, and the old gentleman grumbling audibly. The thin young woman is got upon the roof by dint of a great deal of pulling and pushing, and helping and trouble; and she repays it by expressing her solemn conviction that she will never be able to get down again. “‘All right!’ sings out the guard at last, jumping up as the coach starts, and blowing his horn directly afterwards, in proof of the soundness of his wind. ‘Let ’em go, Harry; give ’em their heads!’ cries the coachman--and off we start as briskly as if the morning were ‘all right,’ as well as the coach.” CHAPTER XV HOW THE COACH PASSENGERS FARED: MANNERS AND CUSTOMS DOWN THE ROAD There is no consensus of opinion to be found among travellers by coach on the subject of the joys or sorrows of old-time travel. Everything depended on the weather, the coach, the other passengers, and upon the nature of the traveller himself. Sometimes a coach journey was a misery; at others it was a joy to look back upon. Humourists of the early and mid-eighteenth century found the subject of coach-travelling very attractive, and returned again and again to the stock characters of the braggart and domineering military man among the passengers, who was really a coward, and the modest, unassuming young man who always killed or dispersed the highwaymen while the captain, who by his own account had fought at Ramilies with Marlborough, prostrated himself on the floor and tried to crawl under the petticoats of the lady passengers or cover himself with the straw that strewed the floor. Those humourists could always get a laugh from such accounts, and sighs of appreciation from the ladies, who all wished they numbered among their acquaintance such proper young men as Roderick Random, who in Smollett’s romance performs such prodigies of valour in the “Exeter Fly” somewhere about the neighbourhood of Turnham Green.