2nd December 1832, while waiting for the mail to Falmouth. He had come from Oxford that morning by the Oxford-Southampton coach. ‘Here I am,’ he says, writing to his mother, ‘from one till eleven,’ waiting for the down Exeter mail. Think, modern railway traveller, what would you say were it your lot to wait ten hours, say at Templecombe Junction, for a connection! Moreover, a bore claiming to be the brother of an acquaintance claimed to share his room and his society at the ‘White Hart,’ and eventually journeyed to Exeter with him. The future Cardinal did not like this. He writes: ‘I am practising for the first time the duty of a traveller, which is sorely against the grain, and have been talkative and agreeable without end,’ adding (one can almost imagine the sigh of the retiring scholar!), ‘Now that I have set up for a man of the world, it is my vocation.’ The latter part of his journey was accomplished at night. Travelling thus through Devonshire and Cornwall is, he remarks, ‘very striking for its mysteriousness.’ It was a beautiful night, ‘clear, frosty, and bright, with a full moon. Mere richness of vegetation is lost by night, but bold features remain. As I came along, I had the whole train of pictures so vividly upon my mind that I could have written a most interesting account of it in the most approved picturesque style of modern composition, but it has all gone from me now, like a dream.’ ‘The night was enlivened by what Herodotus calls a “night engagement” with a man, called by courtesy a gentleman, on the box. The first act ended by his calling me a d----d fool. The second by his insisting on two most hearty shakes of the hand, with the protest that he certainly did think me very injudicious and ill-timed. I had opened by telling him he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maidservant stuck atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain of his giving me the retort uncourteous.’ There are corridors in the ‘White Hart’ with up and down twilight passages, in which the guests of another day lost themselves with promptitude and despatch. There is also a barbarically coloured coffee-room, snug and comfortable, which looks as though Washington Irving could have written an eloquent essay around it; and, more essential than anything else in days of old, a capacious yard with huge yawning stables. For Whitchurch is at the cross [Sidenote: _BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION_] [Illustration: WHITCHURCH.]