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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 postchaise

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,

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surely, the poorest superannuated post-chaise left on earth.

It was a post-chaise taken off its axletree and wheels, and plumped

down on the clayey soil among a ragged growth of vegetables. It

was a post-chaise not even set straight upon the ground, but tilted

over, as if it had fallen out of a balloon. It was a post-chaise

that had been a long time in those decayed circumstances, and

against which scarlet beans were trained. It was a post-chaise

patched and mended with old tea-trays, or with scraps of iron that

looked like them, and boarded up as to the windows, but having A

KNOCKER on the off-side door. Whether it was a post-chaise used as

tool-house, summer-house, or dwelling-house, I could not discover,

for there was nobody at home at the post-chaise when I knocked, but

it was certainly used for something, and locked up. In the wonder

of this discovery, I walked round and round the post-chaise many

times, and sat down by the post-chaise, waiting for further

elucidation. None came. At last, I made my way back to the old

London road by the further end of the allotment-gardens, and

consequently at a point beyond that from which I had diverged. I

had to scramble through a hedge and down a steep bank, and I nearly

came down a-top of a little spare man who sat breaking stones by

the roadside.

He stayed his hammer, and said, regarding me mysteriously through

his dark goggles of wire:

‘Are you aware, sir, that you’ve been trespassing?’

‘I turned out of the way,’ said I, in explanation, ‘to look at that

odd post-chaise. Do you happen to know anything about it?’

‘I know it was many a year upon the road,’ said he.

‘So I supposed. Do you know to whom it belongs?’

The stone-breaker bent his brows and goggles over his heap of

stones, as if he were considering whether he should answer the

question or not. Then, raising his barred eyes to my features as

before, he said:

‘To me.’

Being quite unprepared for the reply, I received it with a

sufficiently awkward ‘Indeed! Dear me!’ Presently I added, ‘Do

you – ‘ I was going to say ‘live there,’ but it seemed so absurd a

question, that I substituted ‘live near here?’

The stone-breaker, who had not broken a fragment since we began to

converse, then did as follows. He raised himself by poising his

finger on his hammer, and took his coat, on which he had been

seated, over his arm. He then backed to an easier part of the bank

than that by which I had come down, keeping his dark goggles

silently upon me all the time, and then shouldered his hammer,

suddenly turned, ascended, and was gone. His face was so small,

and his goggles were so large, that he left me wholly uninformed as

to his countenance; but he left me a profound impression that the

curved legs I had seen from behind as he vanished, were the legs of

an old postboy. It was not until then that I noticed he had been

working by a grass-grown milestone, which looked like a tombstone

erected over the grave of the London road.

My dinner-hour being close at hand, I had no leisure to pursue the

goggles or the subject then, but made my way back to the Dolphin’s

Head. In the gateway I found J. Mellows, looking at nothing, and

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apparently experiencing that it failed to raise his spirits.

‘I don’t care for the town,’ said J. Mellows, when I complimented

him on the sanitary advantages it may or may not possess; ‘I wish I