At last all the hatboxes and bloomin’ luggage were safely stowed, the trunks were lashed in place behind, and I climbed to the top of the stage and took my seat beside my charges.  A merry blast was blown from the tallyho horn.  A man with a red coat, high white hat, kid gloves and a brick-dust complexion mounted the box and gathered up a big handful of reins.  The hostlers at the heads of the leaders let go, twenty feet of whiplash went singing through the air—­and we were off!

We swung through the village with more majesty and clatter than the Empire State Express ever assumed, stopping just an instant at the post-office for a bag of mail that the brick-dusty driver caught with his feet, and then away we went.

I am sorry I did not live in stagecoach times—­things are now so dead and dreary and prosaic.  Yet I sometimes have imagined that today the stagecoach business in England is a little stagey—­many things are done to heighten effects.  For instance, the intense excitement of starting is not exactly necessary—­why the mad rush?  No one is really in a hurry to reach a certain place at a certain time!  And all this is apparent when you notice that a mile out of town the pace subsides to a lazy dog-trot, and the boots has jumped down and unchecked each horse so as to make things easy.  I was glad the boots got down, for whenever I see a horse’s head checked up in the air my impulse is to uncheck him—­and once on Wabash Avenue in Chicago I did.

I was arrested, and it cost me five.

The road to Keswick bristles with history.  Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey tramped it many a time, and since their day, thousands of literary pilgrims have come this way.  That two poets-laureate should have come from this beautiful corner of the earth of course is interesting, but the honor of being poet-laureate to the King is a shifting honor, depending upon the poet.  No title can ever really honor a man, although a man may honor a title, and no King by taking thought can add a cubit to a subject’s stature.  The man is what he is.  Southey succeeded the poet Pye, who was laureate before him.

A weaker nature than mine might here succumb to temptation and play pleasant philological pranks concerning the poet Pye, but I am above all that.  Pye was a good man, and if I could remember any of the lines he wrote, I would here introduce them; but this is doubtless unnecessary, for the gentle reader can recall to suit.

White Pigeon claimed that Pye was greater than Southey, and she further said that Tennyson’s reputation suffered by consenting to act as successor to this line of men in whom felicity and insight were the exception.  The tierce of Canary was no pay for acting as successor to Pye, but Southey jumped at the Canary and slipped his last vestige of radicalism quickly.

“Oh, what a funny little church,” exclaimed Myrtle; “can’t we stop and go in?”

It is a curious little building—­that church at Wythburn.