With that, he turned me by the shoulder in the direction I was to take, and went in and resumed his work against a background of leaves and grapes. For, although he was a soured man and a discontented, his workshop was that agreeable mixture of town and country, street and garden, which is often to be seen in a small English town. I went the way he had turned me, and I came to the Beer-shop with the sign of The First and Last, and was out of the town on the old London road. I came to the Turnpike, and I found it, in its silent way, eloquent respecting the change that had fallen on the road. The Turnpike-house was all overgrown with ivy; and the Turnpike-keeper, unable to get a living out of the tolls, plied the trade of a cobbler. Not only that, but his wife sold ginger-beer, and, in the very window of espial through which the Toll-takers of old times used with awe to behold the grand London coaches coming on at a gallop, exhibited for sale little barber’s-poles of sweetstuff in a sticky lantern. The political economy of the master of the turnpike thus expressed itself. ‘How goes turnpike business, master?’ said I to him, as he sat in his little porch, repairing a shoe. ‘It don’t go at all, master,’ said he to me. ‘It’s stopped.’ ‘That’s bad,’ said I. ‘Bad?’ he repeated. And he pointed to one of his sunburnt dusty children who was climbing the turnpike-gate, and said, extending his open right hand in remonstrance with Universal Nature. ‘Five on ’em!’ ‘But how to improve Turnpike business?’ said I. ‘There’s a way, master,’ said he, with the air of one who had thought deeply on the subject. ‘I should like to know it.’ ‘Lay a toll on everything as comes through; lay a toll on walkers. Lay another toll on everything as don’t come through; lay a toll on them as stops at home.’ ‘Would the last remedy be fair?’ ‘Fair? Them as stops at home, could come through if they liked; couldn’t they?’ ‘Say they could.’ ‘Toll ’em. If they don’t come through, it’s _their_ look out. Anyways,—Toll ’em!’ Finding it was as impossible to argue with this financial genius as if he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer, and consequently the right man in the right place, I passed on meekly. My mind now began to misgive me that the disappointed coach-maker had sent me on a wild-goose errand, and that there was no post-chaise in those parts. But coming within view of certain allotment-gardens by the roadside, I retracted the suspicion, and confessed that I had done him an injustice. For, there I saw, surely, the poorest superannuated post-chaise left on earth.