8. Roused from your fitful nocturnal slumber by the horn or bugle; the lashing and cracking of whips; the noisy arrivals at turnpike gates, or by a search for parcels (which, after all, are not there) under your seat: to say nothing of solicitous drivers who pester you with their entirely uncalled-for attentions. 9. Discovering, at a diverging-point in your journey, that the "Tally-ho" coach runs only every other day or so, or that it has been finally stopped. 10. Clambering from the wheel by various iron projections to your elevated seat, fearful, all the while, of breaking your precious neck. 11. After threading the narrowest streets of an ancient town, entering the inn-yard by a low archway, at the imminent risk of decapitation. 12. Seeing the luggage piled "Olympus high," so as to occasion an alarming oscillation. 13. Having the reins and whip placed in your unpractised hands while coachee indulges in a glass and chat. 14. To be, when dangling at the edge of a seat, overcome with drowsiness. 15. Exposed to piercing draughts, owing to a refractory glass; or, _vice versâ_, being in a minority, you are compelled, for the sake of ventilation, to thrust your umbrella accidentally through a pane. 16. At various seasons, suffocated with dust and broiled by a powerful sun; or crouching under an umbrella in a drenching rain--or petrified with cold--torn by fierce winds--struggling through snow--or wending your way through perilous floods. 17. Perceiving that a young squire is receiving an initiatory lesson into the art of driving; or that a jibbing horse, or a race with an opposition coach, is endangering your existence. 18. Losing the enjoyment, or employment, of much precious time, not only on the road, but also from subsequent fatigue. 19. Interrupted by your two rough-coated, big-buttoned, many-caped friends, the coachman and guard, who hope you will remember them before the termination of your hurried meal. Although the gratuity has been frequently calculated in anticipation, you fail in making the mutual reminiscences agreeable. Clearly this was no _laudator temporis acti_. II But there are two sides to every medal, and it would be quite as easy to draw up an equally long and convincing list of the joys of coaching. It was not always raining or snowing when you wished to go a journey. Highwaymen were always too many, but they did not lurk in every lane; and the coach was not overturned on every journey, nor, even when a coach _did_ upset, were the spilled passengers killed and injured with the revolting circumstance and hideous complexity of a railway accident. On a trip by coach, it was possible to see something of the country and to fill one's lungs with fresh air, instead of coal-smoke and sulphur--and so forth, _ad infinitum_! [Sidenote: _THE COACHING AGE_]