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