Of this nature were some of Dick Forester's reflections as he posted
along towards the West; nor was the scene through which he journeyed
suggestive of pleasanter thoughts. If any of our readers should
perchance be acquainted with that dreary line of country which lies
along the great western road of Ireland, they will not feel surprised
if the traveller's impressions of the land were not of the brightest or
fairest. The least reflective of mortals cannot pass through a dreary
and poverty-stricken district without imbibing some of the melancholy
which broods over the place. Forester was by no means such, and felt
deeply and sincerely for the misery he witnessed on every hand, and was
in the very crisis of some most patriotic scheme of benevolence, when
his carriage arrived in front of the little inn of Kilbeggan. Resisting,
without much violence to his inclinations, the civil request of the
landlord to alight, he leaned back to resume the broken thread of his
lucubrations, while fresh horses were put to. How long he thus waited,
or what progress his benign devices accomplished in the mean while, this
true history is unable to record; enough if we say that when he next
became aware of the incidents then actually happening around him, he
discovered that his carriage was standing fast in the same place as at
the moment of his arrival, and the rain falling in torrents, as before.
To let down the glass and call out to the postilions was a very natural
act; to do so with the addition of certain expletives not commonly used
in good society, was not an extraordinary one. Forester did both; but he
might have spared his eloquence and his indignation, for the postilions
were both in the stable, and his servant agreeably occupied in the bar
over the comforts of a smoking tumbler of punch. The merciful schemes so
late the uppermost object of his thoughts were routed in a moment, and,
vowing intentions of a very different purport to the whole household,
he opened the door and sprang out. Dark as the night was, he could see
that there were no horses to the carriage, and, with redoubled anger at
the delay, he strode into the inn.
“Holloa, I say--house here! Linwood! Where the devil is the fellow?”
“Here, sir,” cried a smart-looking London servant, as he sprang from
the bar with his eyes bolting out of his head from the heat of the last
mouthful, swallowed in a second. “I've been a trying for horses, sir;
but they've never got 'em, though they 've been promising to let us have
a pair this half-hour.”
“No horses! Do you mean that they've not got a pair of posters in a town
like this?”
“Yes, indeed, sir,” interposed a dirty waiter in a nankeen jacket;
for the landlord was too indignant at the rejection of his proposal to
appear again, “we've four pair, besides a mare in foal; but there's a
deal of business on the line this week past, and there's a gentleman in
the parlor now has taken four of them.”
“Taken four! Has he more than one carriage?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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