then away we went.

I am sorry I did not live in stagecoach times--things are now so dead and
dreary and prosaic. Yet I sometimes have imagined that today the
stagecoach business in England is a little stagey--many things are done to
heighten effects. For instance, the intense excitement of starting is not
exactly necessary--why the mad rush? No one is really in a hurry to reach
a certain place at a certain time! And all this is apparent when you
notice that a mile out of town the pace subsides to a lazy dog-trot, and
the boots has jumped down and unchecked each horse so as to make things
easy. I was glad the boots got down, for whenever I see a horse's head
checked up in the air my impulse is to uncheck him--and once on Wabash
Avenue in Chicago I did.

I was arrested, and it cost me five.

The road to Keswick bristles with history. Coleridge, Wordsworth and
Southey tramped it many a time, and since their day, thousands of literary
pilgrims have come this way. That two poets-laureate should have come from
this beautiful corner of the earth of course is interesting, but the honor
of being poet-laureate to the King is a shifting honor, depending upon the
poet. No title can ever really honor a man, although a man may honor a
title, and no King by taking thought can add a cubit to a subject's
stature. The man is what he is. Southey succeeded the poet Pye, who was
laureate before him.

A weaker nature than mine might here succumb to temptation and play
pleasant philological pranks concerning the poet Pye, but I am above all
that. Pye was a good man, and if I could remember any of the lines he
wrote, I would here introduce them; but this is doubtless unnecessary, for
the gentle reader can recall to suit.

White Pigeon claimed that Pye was greater than Southey, and she further
said that Tennyson's reputation suffered by consenting to act as successor
to this line of men in whom felicity and insight were the exception. The
tierce of Canary was no pay for acting as successor to Pye, but Southey
jumped at the Canary and slipped his last vestige of radicalism quickly.

"Oh, what a funny little church," exclaimed Myrtle; "can't we stop and go
in?"

It is a curious little building--that church at Wythburn.

It looks like a little girl's playhouse, that might have belonged to her
great-great-grandmother.

Opposite this lovely little church is a tavern, where a lovely barmaid in
white apron and lovely collar and cuffs stoo