Round about a Brighton Coach Office (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter 2 THE COACHMASTER A HEN my Father was a Hampshire plough-boy, he often looked over the hedge and saw the coach go by from Winchester to Reading; and he thought of all things in this world it were best to be the driver of a coach. Small wonder that he looked at the coach with longing and vague hope. On his side of the hedge, life was dull enough. He was always in the fields and had no schooling. His father could ill have spared him for that, for the little lad's scant earnings made it possible to give the others a dinner of bacon once a week. At an age when the children of gentlefolk were still at play in the nursery, he and his like must out with a clapper to scare the rooks from the new-sown fields; or plod at the head of the plough, guiding the strong gentle horses, or crouch over the dull acres of fallow land, ridding them of stones from hedge to hedge. And if the childhood was dreary and strenuous, the manhood was little better. To rise before day-break the long year through, to grow old and crippled before middle-manhood with the hard toil, poor fare and worse housing, this was the prospect for him and his like. This was the lot of his father before him, who had had the luck of getting the best wages to be earned in those parts. Upon this wage, eight shillings a week, he kept himself and wife and four children, living God knows how, in a two-roomed hovel, a picturesque little place with a mossy rotten thatch and bottle- glass windows, good for neither light nor air. For such there was neither change nor bettering, save from the clayey field to the tap-room of the "White Horse," until worn out by the long struggle with Mother Earth for bare existence, they came to claim a little space in her lap in which to lay their worn-out bodies. On the othe...