One of these short stages is mentioned in _David Copperfield_, where David’s page-boy, stealing Dora’s watch and selling it, purchases a second-hand flute and expends the balance of his ill-gotten gains in incessantly travelling up and down the road between London and Uxbridge. Evidently a lover of the road, this larcenous page-boy. Most boys in buttons (and certainly the typical page-boy of the typical farce) would have expended the plunder in pastry or tobacco. This particular specimen, the diligent Dickens-reader will remember, was taken to Bow Street on the completion of his fifteenth journey, when four shillings and sixpence and the second-hand flute--which he couldn’t play--were found upon him. If we were contemplating an examination-paper on _David Copperfield_, with special reference to prices and social life early in the nineteenth century, we might put the following poser:--“State the average price obtainable on the average lady’s gold watch, and, deducting the purchase price of a second-hand flute, deduce from the resulting sum, and from the facts of the boy having made the journey fifteen times and still being in possession of four-and-sixpence, the cost of a single outside journey between London and Uxbridge.” The fare was, as a matter of fact, half a crown. There were no fewer than seven short stages between London and Uxbridge daily, each making two journeys. What of those London inns whence they started? Where are they now? Echo does not answer “where?” as she is commonly said to do, because it is not in the nature of echoes to repeat the first word of a sentence. No; echo merely reverberates “now?” with a questioning inflection. The “Goose and Gridiron,” whose proper name was originally the “Swan and Harp,” in St. Paul’s Churchyard, was one of these starting-points. From the same inn went the Richmond and many other suburban stages. That old inn was demolished about 1888. The “Boar and Castle and Oxford Hotel,” No. 6, Oxford Street, was another house of call for the Uxbridge stages. It vanished long ago, and those who seek it will only find on its site the Oxford Music Hall and Restaurant--bearing a different number, for the street was renumbered in 1881. The “Boar and Castle” was a large, plain, stucco-fronted house, with its name writ large across the front in raised letters.