one man at work – a dry man, grizzled, and far advanced in years,
but tall and upright, who, becoming aware of me looking on,
straightened his back, pushed up his spectacles against his brownpaper
cap, and appeared inclined to defy me. To whom I pacifically
said:
‘Good day, sir!’
‘What?’ said he.
‘Good day, sir.’
He seemed to consider about that, and not to agree with me. – ‘Was
you a looking for anything?’ he then asked, in a pointed manner.
‘I was wondering whether there happened to be any fragment of an
old stage-coach here.’
‘Is that all?’
‘That’s all.’
‘No, there ain’t.’
It was now my turn to say ‘Oh!’ and I said it. Not another word
did the dry and grizzled man say, but bent to his work again. In
the coach-making days, the coach-painters had tried their brushes
on a post beside him; and quite a Calendar of departed glories was
to be read upon it, in blue and yellow and red and green, some
inches thick. Presently he looked up again.
‘You seem to have a deal of time on your hands,’ was his querulous
remark.
I admitted the fact.
‘I think it’s a pity you was not brought up to something,’ said he.
I said I thought so too.
Appearing to be informed with an idea, he laid down his plane (for
it was a plane he was at work with), pushed up his spectacles
again, and came to the door.
‘Would a po-shay do for you?’ he asked.
‘I am not sure that I understand what you mean.’
‘Would a po-shay,’ said the coachmaker, standing close before me,
and folding his arms in the manner of a cross-examining counsel –
‘would a po-shay meet the views you have expressed? Yes, or no?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you keep straight along down there till you see one. YOU’LL
see one if you go fur enough.’
Page 153
Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
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 Turnpikekeeper,
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