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 so that he must have ridden over twelve miles an hour; and a good day's work in truth!

Most of the landlords of the old coaching hostelries were sporting men, and wonderful stories are told of their doings, stories that probably, like most wines, have improved with age. Indeed, a vast amount of inn-lore (we have folk-lore, why not inn-lore?) may be picked up by the road traveller of to-day, from talkative landlords and communicative ostlers, if he be a good listener. I should think that I have gathered this journey sufficient anecdotes of the road, good, bad, and indifferent, to fill two chapters at least. But the stories lose much when retold in prosaic print; it is the persons who tell them, and the manner of telling, together with suitable surroundings, that give them a special charm. To do them justice you must hear them in a remote country hostelry from the lips of some jovial old host—for a few such may still be found on the way—whose interest lies in that direction; and if told in his low-ceilinged parlour, hung round with prints of coaching and sporting subjects, produced in the pre-*chromo-lithographic age, so much the better; if over a pipe, better still. Then perchance mine host may settle down and warm up to his subject, when one story will inevitably suggest another, and that still another, and so on apparently ad infinitum, till your note-book is filled with all sorts of curious histories. Or failing the landlord, the "wrinkled ostler, grim and thin," may well supply his place; and the rambling old inn-yard where some of the wonderful feats related took place, or are presumed to have