inns at which they waited, and the cold rounds of beef inside, and the stunted ostler, with his blue nose
and clinking pail, where is he, and where is his generation? To those great geniuses now in petticoats,
who shall write novels for the beloved readers children, these men and things will be as much legend
and history as Nineveh, or Coeur de Lion, or Jack Sheppard. For them stage-coaches will have become
romances a team of four bays as fabulous as Bucephalus or Black Bess. Ah, how their coats shone,
as the stable-men pulled their clothes off, and away they wentah, how their tails shook, as with smoking
sides at the stages end they demurely walked away into the inn-yard. Alas! we shall never hear the
horn sing at midnight, or see the pike-gates fly open any more. Whither, however, is the light four-inside
Trafalgar coach carrying us? Let us be set down at Queens Crawley without further divagation, and see
how Miss Rebecca Sharp speeds there.