grow a few vegetables and flowers, but much of the furniture was of the
poorest description, much inferior to what it is now, and his lot was not
a happy one. As to locomotion, it did not exist. To go a few miles from
home was quite an event; on the main roads ran coaches, with two, or
three, or four horses, but the general mode of conveyance was the
carrier's cart, sometimes drawn by one horse and sometimes by two. Some
of the happiest days of my life were spent in the carrier's cart, where
the travellers were seated on the luggage, their feet well protected by
straw, where we were all hail fellows well met, and each enjoyed his
little joke, especially when the rural intellect was stimulated by beer
and baccy. The old village inn where we stopped to water the horses and
refresh the inner man seemed to me all the more respectable when compared
with the pestiferous beershops that had then begun to infest the land, to
increase the crime, the misery, the pauperism of a district which already
had quite enough of them before.

But to return to locomotion. A post-chaise was generally resorted to
when the gentry travelled. It was painted yellow and black, and on one
of the two horses by which it was drawn was seated an ancient, withered
old man, generally known as the post-boy, whose age might be anywhere
between forty and eighty, dressed in a jockey costume, in white hat and
top boots; altogether, a bent, grotesque figure whom Tennyson must have
had in his eye when he wrote--for the post-boy was often as not an
ostler--

Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin,
Here is custom come your way;
Take my brute and lead him in,
Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay.

CHAPTER II.
A LIFE'S MEMORIES.

Long, long before John Forster wrote to recommend everyone to write
memoirs of himself it had become the fashion to do so. "That celebrated
orator," writes Dr. Edmund Calamy, one of the most learned of our
Nonconformist divines, "Caius Cornelius Tacitus, in the beginning of his
account of the life of his father-in-law, Julius Agricola (who was the
General of Domitian, the Emperor, here in Britain, and the first who made
the Roman part of Britain a Praesidial province), excuses this practice
from carrying in it anything of arrogance." This excellent example was
followed by Julius Caesar, Marcus Antoninus, many emperors who kept
diaries, Flavius Josephus, St. Gregory of Nazianzen, St. Augustine, to
say nothing of