ith a strong sprinkling of boys,
amongst whom he was quite at his ease, and who were even more eager
to hear than he to sing and talk. And of both songs and talk he had
a curious and ample store. Of songs his own special favorites, I
remember, were a long ballad in which a faithful soldier is informed
on his return to his native village that his own true love "lives with
her own granny dear," which he, his mind running in military grooves,
takes for "grenadier," with temporarily distressing results--though
all comes right at last--and a lyrical description of an upset of his
coach, the only one he ever had, written by a gifted hostler. But on
call he could give "The Tight Little Island," "Rule Britannia" or any
one of a dozen other insular melodies.

Then his talk was racy of his beloved road, of which he would recount
the glories even in the days of its decline, when the cormorant iron
way was already swallowing stage after stage of the best of it. He
would narrate to us the doings and feats of mighty whips--notably of
a never-to-be-forgotten dinner at the Pelican Inn, Newbury, to which
were gathered the _elite_ of the Bath-road cracksmen. At that great
repast we heard how "for wittles there was trout, speckled like a
dane dog, weal as wite as allablaster, sherry-wite-wine, red-port,
and everything in season. Then for company there was Sir Pay (Sir H.
Peyton), Squire Willy boys (Vielbois), Cherry Bob, Long Dick, _and_
I; and where would you go to find five sech along any road out of
London?" But his crowning story, which he never missed as he cracked
his four bays along on the first stage west out of Reading, was that
of the Berkshire Lady, which, alas! my gifted countrywoman has now
laid covetous hands on and claimed for that dour Lady Mary Hay,
hereditary lord high constable of Scotland,

The "Berkshire Lady" is so bound up in my mind with my early friend
of the road, from whom I first heard it, that I have let Memory fairly
run away with me. But now, if your readers will pardon me for this
gossip, I will promise to stick to my text.

At the beginning of the last century the fortune of one of the last of
the "Great Clothiers of the West," John Kendrick, was inherited by a
young lady, his granddaughter, who thus became the mistress of Calcott
Park, past which the Bath road runs, three miles to the west of
Reading. The house stands some three hundred yards from the road,
facing due south, with a background of noble