At Newark, a hundred and twenty-five miles of our journey performed, it is broad daylight as the coach rolls, making the echoes resound, into the great market-square. Clock-faces--a little blanched and debauched-looking to our fancy--proclaim the hour to be 5.30 a.m. The change is waiting for us in front of the “Saracen’s Head,” and so is our new coachman. The old one leaves us, but before doing so “kicks us”--as the expressive phraseology of the road has it--for the usual fees. He has been, so far as we remember him, a dour, silent, unsociable man, but we think that, perhaps, as we have been asleep during the best part of his reign on the box-seat, any qualities he may possess have not had their due opportunity, and so he gets two shillings from ourselves. A passenger behind us gives him a shilling, which he promptly spits on and turns, “for luck” as he says, and “in ’opes it’ll grow.” The passenger who gave it him says, thereupon--in a broad Scots accent--that he is “an impudent fellow, and desairves to get nothing at all;” to which the jarvey rejoins that he has in his time brought many a Scotchman from Scotland, but, “this is the fust time, blow me, that _h_ever I see one agoin’ back!”--which is a very dark and mysterious saying. What did he mean? Our new coachman is a complete change from our late Jehu. He is a spruce, cheerful fellow, neat and well brushed, youthful and prepossessing. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he says cheerily: “another fine day.” We had not noticed it. All we had observed was of each other, and that as every other looked pale, wearied and heavy-eyed, so we rightly judged must be our own condition. “Chk!” says our youthful charioteer to his horses, and away they bound. Newark market-square glides by, and we are crossing the Trent, over a long bridge. “Newark Castle, gentlemen,” says our coachman, jerking his whip to the left hand; and there we see, rising from the banks of the broad river, the crumbling, time-stained towers of a ruined mediæval fortress. Much he has to say of it, for he is intelligent beyond the ordinary run. A good and graceful whip, too--one of the new school: much persuasion and little punishment for the horses, who certainly seem to put forward their best paces at his merest suggestion. It is a good, flat, and fairly straight road, this ten-mile stage to Scarthing Moor. We cross the Trent again, then a low-lying tract of water-meadows, where the night mists still cling in ghost-like wisps to the grass, and then several small villages. “This”--says our coachman, pointing to a church beside the road, and down the street of one of these little villages--“this is where Oliver Cromwell came from.” “What is the name of it?” we ask, knowing that, whatever its name, the Protector came from quite a different place. “Cromwell,” he says. So this was probably the original seat of that family many centuries before Oliver came into the world, which has since then been so greatly exercised about him.