Ovington's Bank by Stanley J. Weyman — Read

Travelling in the old coaching days was not all hardship. It had its own, its peculiar pleasures. A writer of that time dwells with eloquence on the rapture with which he viewed a fine sunrise from the outside of a fast coach on the Great North Road; on the appetite with which he fell to upon a five o'clock breakfast at Doncaster, on the delight with which he heard the nightingales sing on a fine night as he swept through Henley, on the satisfaction of seeing old Shoreditch Church, which betokened the end of the journey. Men did not then hurry at headlong speed along iron rails, with their heads buried in a newspaper or in the latest novel. They learned to know and had time to view the objects of interest that fringed the highway-to recognize the farm at which the Great Durham Ox was bred, and the house in which the equally great Sir Isaac Newton was born. If these things were strange to the travellers and their appearance promised a good fee, the coachman condescended from his greatness and affably pointed them out.

But to sit through the long winter night, changing each hour from one damp and musty post-chaise to another, to stamp and fume and fret while horses were put to at every stage, to scold an endless succession of incoming and fee an endless series of out-going postboys, each more sleepy and sullen than the last-this was another matter. To be delayed here and checked there and overcharged everywhere, to be fobbed off with the worst teams-always reserved for night travellers-and to find, once started on the long fourteen-mile stage, that the off-wheeler was dead lame, to fall asleep and to be aroused with every hour-these were the miseries, and costly miseries they were, of old-world journeying. This was its seamy side. And many a time Clement, stamping his stone-cold feet in wind-swept inn yards, or ringing ostlers' bells in stone-paved passages, repented that he had started, repented that he had ever undertaken the task.