Fairoaks, after a dreary night passed in the mail-coach, where a stout
fellow-passenger, swelling preternaturally with great-coats, had crowded
him into a corner, and kept him awake by snoring indecently; where a
widow lady, opposite, had not only shut out the fresh air by closing all
the windows of the vehicle, but had filled the interior with fumes of
Jamaica rum and water, which she sucked perpetually from a bottle in her
reticule; where, whenever he caught a brief moment of sleep, the twanging
of the horn at the turnpike-gates, or the scuffling of his huge neighbour
wedging him closer and closer, or the play of the widow's feet on his own
tender toes, speedily woke up the poor gentleman to the horrors and
realities of life--a life which has passed away now and become
impossible, and only lives in fond memories. Eight miles an hour, for
twenty or five-and-twenty hours, a tight mail-coach, a hard seat, a gouty
tendency, a perpetual change of coachmen grumbling because you did not
fee them enough, a fellow-passenger partial to spirits-and-water,--who
has not borne with these evils in the jolly old times? and how could
people travel under such difficulties? And yet they did, and were merry
too. Next the widow, and by the side of the Major's servant on the roof,
were a couple of school-boys going home for the midsummer holidays, and
Major Pendennis wondered to see them sup at the inn at Bagshot, where
they took in a cargo of ham, eggs, pie, pickles, tea, coffee, and boiled
beef, which surprised the poor Major, sipping a cup of very feeble tea,
and thinking with a tender dejection that Lord Steyne's dinner was coming
off at that very moment. The ingenuous ardour of the boys, however,
amused the Major, who was very good-natured, and he became the more
interested when he found that the one who travelled inside with him was a
lord's son, whose noble father Pendennis, of course, had met in the world
of fashion which he frequented. The little lord slept all night through,
in spite of the squeezing, and the horn-blowing, and the widow; and he
looked as fresh as paint (and, indeed; pronounced himself to be so) when