THE STOUT GENTLEMAN.

A STAGE-COACH ROMANCE.

  “I’ll cross it, though it blast me!”

  —­Hamlet.

It was a rainy Sunday, in the gloomy month of November.  I had been detained, in the course of a journey, by a slight indisposition, from which I was recovering; but I was still feverish, and was obliged to keep within doors all day, in an inn of the small town of Derby.  A wet Sunday in a country inn!—­whoever has had the luck to experience one can alone judge of my situation.

The rain pattered against the casements; the bells tolled for church with a melancholy sound.  I went to the windows, in quest of something to amuse the eye; but it seemed as if I had been placed completely out of the reach of all amusement.  The windows of my bed-room looked out among tiled roofs and stacks of chimneys, while those of my sitting-room commanded a full view of the stable-yard.  I know of nothing more calculated to make a man sick of this world, than a stable-yard on a rainy day.  The place was littered with wet straw, that had been kicked about by travellers and stable-boys.  In one corner was a stagnant pool of water, surrounding an island of muck; there were several half-drowned fowls crowded together under a cart, among which was a miserable, crest-fallen cock, drenched out of all life and spirit; his drooping tail matted, as it were, into a single feather, along which the water trickled from his back; near the cart was a half-dozing cow chewing the cud, and standing patiently to be rained on, with wreaths of vapor rising from her reeking hide; a wall-eyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stable, was poking his spectral head out of the window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves; an unhappy cur, chained to a dog-house hard by, uttered something every now and then, between a bark and a yelp; a drab of a kitchen-wench tramped backwards and forwards through the yard in pattens, looking as sulky as the weather itself; every thing, in short, was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hard-drinking ducks, assembled like boon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor.

I was lonely and listless, and wanted amusement.  My room soon became insupportable.  I abandoned it, and sought what is technically called the travellers’-room.  This is a public room set apart at most inns for the accommodation of a class of wayfarers called travellers, or riders; a kind of commercial knights-errant, who are incessantly scouring the kingdom in gigs, on horseback, or by coach.  They are the only successors that I know of, at the present day, to the knights-errant of yore.  They lead the same kind of roving adventurous life, only changing the lance for a driving-whip, the buckler for a pattern-card, and the coat of mail for an upper Benjamin.  Instead of vindicating the charms of peerless beauty, they rove about spreading