We have already seen something of the old waggon-life, as shown by Smollett: let us now inquire into the costs and charges of the journey, apart from the fare. How did these humble folk eat and drink, and how did they lodge for the night when the waggon came to its inn at sunset? Sometimes they slept in the shelter of the waggon itself, under the substantial covering of the great canvas tilt, snugly curled up in the hay and straw, and barricaded by the crates and boxes that formed part of the load--not an altogether uncomfortable, if certainly too promiscuous, a sleeping arrangement. At other times the stable-lofts of the inns formed their apartments. Landlords of reputable hostelries, mindful of the social gulf that (in the opinion of the insides) existed between the inside passengers of a stage-coach and those off-scourings of the country who rode on the roof or in the “basket,” did not commonly allow those belonging to that even lower stratum, the waggons, to sleep in their houses. A supper of cold boiled beef and bread in the kitchen, followed by a shake-down in the hay or straw of the stables, at an inclusive price of sixpence or ninepence, was their portion. Swift himself, that terrible genius of the eighteenth century, who knew the extremities of obscurity and fame, of penury and affluence, was, in his early days, of this poor company. When a young man, travelling from the house of his patron, Sir William Temple, at Moor Park, near Farnham, in Surrey, to see his mother at Leicester, he rode in the waggon, and slept at “the penny hedge-inns,” where they were not above letting a bed for the night to a young man so unusually particular as to pay sixpence extra for clean sheets and a bed to himself--an exclusive arrangement, it would appear, not within the everyday philosophy of those humble caravanserais. He whom not only later ages, but even his contemporaries, unite in acclaiming a genius, generally chose to take his food with waggoners, ostlers, and persons of that station. The superfine Lord Orrery, who recorded these facts, and tells us that Swift “delighted in scenes of low life,” says he “dined” with them; but if Lord Orrery had been as well acquainted with humble circles he would have known that the low people in them do not “dine” at all; they just “have dinner.” [Illustration: THE ROAD WAGGON: A TRYING CLIMB. _After J. Pollard._ ] It is impossible to obtain more than a glimpse of the early carriers, and even the later stage-waggons were only occasionally advertised in the newspapers of the past. Thus, turning to Sussex, we only hear of “Thomas Smith, the Old Lewes Carrier,” in a reference to him after his death. How many years he had jogged along the green Surrey and Sussex lanes on his weekly journeys between Southwark and Lewes we know not. He died in 1746, and his widow carried on the business, according to her advertisement in the _Lewes Journal_:--