Shergold, who in the coaching era was proprietor of the “Castle Hotel,” Brighton, and had every reason to know what life on the road was like, declared, in a very readable pamphlet he wrote, that “a woman was a creature to be looked at, admired, courted, and beloved in a stage-coach”; but let the rash modern traveller presume to look admiringly at the lady occupant of a railway carriage, and it is not at all unlikely that she will be horribly frightened, and take the next opportunity of changing into another compartment. An amusing tale, declared to be true, has been told of the possibilities of a coach in the love-making sort. It was about 1780 that a young gentleman, anxious to win the good graces of a lady, and lacking other opportunities, engaged all the remaining inside seats of the coach between Glasgow and Edinburgh by which he knew she would travel. He succeeded so well in his enterprise that the lady consented on the journey to be his bride; but candour compels the admission that the marriage thus romantically agreed upon turned out a particularly unhappy one. The final test of a gentleman in those days was his behaviour at a stage-coach dinner. It was, if you consider it, a very severe and unfair test, for it is allowed that politeness generally leaves starving people at an early stage; and the appetites that coach passengers brought with them into the dining-room of an inn were usually very keen. An acquaintance of Constable, the painter, could find no more striking climax to a list of his virtues than to declare that he was “a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner.” “Then,” said his companion, “he must have been a gentleman indeed!” What, then, did it mean, this gentlemanly conduct? It meant, in short, that one who could fairly lay claim to it must take some lady of the party into his care, escort her from the coach into the inn, see to it that she was provided with dinner, and pay her reckoning, he must not first attempt to satisfy his own hunger, although perhaps he was up at five o’clock in the morning, and had only taken a hurried coach-breakfast at the first stage out.