The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and RomanceHyde, James Wilson
History
The Royal Mail: Its Curiosities and Romance
Hyde, James Wilson
Postal service -- Great Britain
"We flew away from Glasgow on the top of the mail, ten miles an hour,
past steaming meadows and smoking chimneys, to the Cumberland lakes, to
Keswick, Kendal, and the prettiest towns and villages. The whole country
is like a drawing-room. The rocky walls are papered with bushes, moss,
and firs; the trees are carefully wrapped up in ivy; there are no walls
or fences, only high hedges, and you see them all the way up flat
hill-tops. On all sides carriages full of travellers fly along the
roads; the corn stands in sheaves; slopes, hills, precipices, are all
covered with thick, warm foliage. Then again our eyes dwelt on the
dark-blue English distance--many a noble castle, and so on, until we
reached Ambleside. There the sky turned gloomy again, and we had rain
and storm. Sitting on the top of the 'stage,' and madly careering along
ravines, past lakes, up-hill, down-hill, wrapped in cloaks, and
umbrellas up, we could see nothing but railings, heaps of stones or
ditches, and but rarely catch glimpses of hills and lakes. Sometimes
our umbrellas scraped against the roofs of the houses, and then, wet
through, we would come to a second-rate inn, with a high blazing fire,
and English conversation about walking, coals, supper, the weather, and
Bonaparte. Yesterday our seats on the coach were accidentally separated,
so that I hardly spoke to Klingemann, for changing horses was done in
about forty seconds. I sat on the box next by the coachman, who asked me
whether I flirted much, and made me talk a good deal, and taught me the
slang of horsemanship. Klingemann sat next to two old women, with whom
he shared his umbrella. Again manufactories, meadows, parks, provincial
towns, here a canal, there a railway, then the sea with ships, six full
coaches with towering outsiders following each other; in the evening a
thick fog, the stage running madly in the darkness. Through the fog we
see lamps gleaming all about the horizon; the smoke of manufactories
envelops us on all sides; gentlemen on horseback ride past; one
coach-horn blows in B flat, another in D, others follow in the distance,
and here we are at Liverpool."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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