As these lines are being written, the last of the old coaching inns from which some of the Bath stages started, is being demolished. The "White Horse," in Fetter Lane, Holborn, fell upon evil days when railways revolutionized its custom. Where Lord Eldon stayed in 1766, and whence many another aristocratic traveller set forth, tramps and fourpenny "dossers" found refuge. The "White Horse" inn became the "White Horse Chambers"--not the kind of chambers understood in St. James's, but rather the cheap cubicles of St. Giles's. [Illustration: THE "WHITE HORSE" INN, FETTER LANE. DEMOLISHED 1898.] [Sidenote: _DEPARTED GLORIES_] Cary's "Itinerary" for 1821 (Cary was a guide, philosopher, and friend without whom our grandfathers never travelled) gives no fewer than thirty-seven stage-coaches which started from this old house. There was the "Accommodation" to Oxford, at seven o'clock in the morning; the Bath and Bristol Light Post coach, at two in the afternoon, arriving at Bristol at eight o'clock the following morning; and the Worcester, Cheltenham, and Woodstock coaches, which all travelled along the Bath road to Maidenhead. Then there were the York "Highflier," a crack Light Post coach, every morning, at nine o'clock; the "Princess Charlotte," to Brighton; the Lynn, Dover, Cambridge, Ipswich, and other coaches too numerous to mention in detail. It will, therefore, not be surprising to learn that the stables of this busy hostelry were large enough to hold seventy horses. At the foot of the staircase, near the entrance, was the office, and everywhere were long passages and interminable suites of rooms. But how different the circumstances in later years! The vast apartment that was the public dining-room became, in fact, a kind of socialistic kitchen. There, when his day's work was done, the kerbstone merchant came to grill the cheap chop he had purchased. There the professional cadger toasted a herring, while his companions cooked scraps of meat or toasted cheese. This part of Holborn was once famous for its old inns. Indeed, on the opposite side of that main artery of traffic were the "Black Bull" and the "Old Bell." There is nothing left of the first now except the great black effigy of a bull with a golden zone about the middle of him, and beyond the archway a courtyard which was once the galleried courtyard of the inn, but is now just the area of a block of peculiarly dirty "model" dwellings. [Illustration: COURTYARD OF THE "OLD BELL," HOLBORN. DEMOLISHED 1897.] [Sidenote: _THE "OLD BELL"_]