Again my beauties blushed for a while unseen; but I was new painted, and, like some other painted personages, looked, at a distance, almost as good as new.  Fortunately for me, an elderly country curate, just at this period, was presented with a living, and the new incumbent thought it incumbent upon him to present his fat lady and his thin daughter with a leathern convenience.  My life was now a rural one, and for ten long years nothing worth recording happened to me.  Slowly and surely did I creep along green lanes, carried the respectable trio to snug, early, neighbourly dinners, and was always under lock and key before twelve o’clock.  It must be owned I began to have rather an old-fashioned look; my body was ridiculously small, and the rector’s thin daughter, the bodkin, or rather packing-needle of the party, sat more forward, and on a smaller space than bodkins do now-a-days.  I was perched up three feet higher than more modern vehicles, and my two lamps began to look like little dark lanterns.  But my obsoleteness rendered me only more suited to the service in which I was enlisted.  Honest Roger, the red-haired coachman, would have looked like a clown in a pantomime, in front of a fashionable equipage; and Simon the footboy, who slouched at my back, would have been mistaken for an idle urchin surreptitiously enjoying a ride.  But on my unsophisticated dickey and footboard no one could doubt but that Roger and Simon were in their proper places.  The rector died; of course he had nothing more to do with the living, it passed into other hands; and a clerical income being (alas, that it should be so!) no inheritance, his relict suddenly plunged in widowhood and poverty, had the aggravated misery of mourning for a deaf husband, while she was conscious that the luxuries and almost the necessaries of life were for ever snatched from herself and her child.

Again I found myself in London, but my beauty was gone, I had lost the activity of youth, and when slowly I chanced to creak through Long Acre, Houlditch, my very parent, who was standing at his door sending forth a new-born Britska, glanced at me scornfully, and knew me not!  I passed on heavily—­I thought of former days of triumph, and there was madness in the thought I became a crazy vehicle! straw was thrust into my inward parts, I was numbered among the fallen,—­yes, I was now a hackney-chariot, and my number was one hundred!

What tongue can tell the degradations I have endured!  The persons who familiarly have called me, the wretches who have sat in me—­never can this be told.  Daily I take my stand in the same vile street, and nightly am I driven to the minor theatres—­to oyster-shops—­to desperation!