One does not traverse well nigh four score years without having experienced longings for the unattainable on several occasions. But I have no remembrance of any such eager, craving longing as the chronic longing of those days to make one of the great-coated companies who were departing to their various destinations by those “Telegraphs,” “High-Flyers,” “Magnets,” and “Independents.” (The more suggestive names of the “Wonder,” and its rival the “No Wonder!” once celebrated on the north-western road, belonged to a later day.) Had I been offered a seat on any of these vehicles my choice would have been dictated solely by considerations of distance--Falmouth for choice, as the westward Ultima Thule of coaching experience. With what rapture should I have climbed, in my little round jacket as I was, and without a thought of any other protection, to the roof of the Falmouth mail--_the_ mail for choice, the Devonport “Quicksilver” being then in the womb of the future--and started to fetch a forgotten letter (say) of the utmost importance, with strict injunctions to bring it back by the returning coach! I don’t think my imagination had yet soared to the supreme glories of the box seat. That came later. To have been a booked passenger, that that horn should have sounded _for me_, that I should have been included in the guard’s final and cheery assurance, that at length all was “right”--would have been ample enough for an ecstasy of happiness. What an endless vista of ever-changing miles of country! What an infinite succession of “teams!” What a delicious sense of belonging to some select and specially important and adventurous section of humanity as we should clatter at midnight, or even at three or four o’clock in the morning, through the streets of quiet little country towns, ourselves the only souls awake in all the place! What speculations as to the immediate bestowal and occupation of the coachman, when he “left you here, sir!” in the small hours! What a delightful sense of the possible dangers of the undertaking as testified by many eagerly read narratives of the disasters of the road. Alas! I had no share in it all, save to stand on the curbstone amid the crowd of Jew boys selling oranges and cedar pencils sixpence a dozen, and hurrying passengers and guards and porters, and look on them all with envious longing. _Nota bene._ On such an occasion at the present day--if it be possible to conceive such an anachronism--the Jew boys above referred to would be probably Christian boys, and the object of their commerce, the evening papers. But I have no recollection of any such element in the scene at the White Horse Cellar some sixty-eight years since.