transferred his lease.
    The coachman was an excellent travelling companion and commentator on the
landscape; he could tell the names of sites and persons, and explained the
meaning of groups, as well as the shade of Virgil in a more memorable journey;
he had as many stories about parishes, and the men and women in them, as the
Wanderer in the »Excursion,« only his style was different. His view of life had
originally been genial, and such as became a man who was well warmed within and
without, and held a position of easy, undisputed authority; but the recent
initiation of railways had embittered him: he now, as in a perpetual vision, saw
the ruined country strewn with shattered limbs, and regarded Mr Huskisson's
death as a proof of God's anger against Stephenson. »Why, every inn on the road
would be shut up!« and at that word the coachman looked before him with the
blank gaze of one who had driven his coach to the outermost edge of the
universe, and saw his leaders plunging into the abyss. Still he would soon
relapse from the high prophetic strain to the familiar one of narrative. He knew
whose the land was wherever he drove; what noblemen had half-ruined themselves
by gambling; who made handsome returns of rent; and who was at daggers-drawn
with his eldest son. He perhaps remembered the fathers of actual baronets, and
knew stories of their extravagant or stingy housekeeping; whom they had married,
whom they had horsewhipped, whether they were particular about preserving their
game, and whether they had had much to do with canal companies. About any actual
landed proprietor he could also tell whether he was a Reformer or an
anti-Reformer. That was a distinction which had turned up in latter times, and
along with it the paradox, very puzzling to the coachman's mind, that there were
men of old family and large estate who voted for the Bill. He did not grapple
with the paradox; he let it pass, with all the discreetness of an experienced
theologian or learned scholiast, preferring to point his whip at some object
which could raise no questions.
    No such paradox troubled our coachman when, leaving the town of Treby Magna
behind him, he drove between the hedges for a mile or so, crossed the queer long
bridge over the river Lapp, and then put his horses to a swift gallop up the
hill by the low-nestled village of Little Treby, till they were on the fine
level road, skirted on one side by grand larches, oaks, and wych elms,