But

train is moving from the platform. here was an agony prolonged for seventy-four miles, and suffered in a sinister silence. Why that silence when experience would lead one to expect curses? I should much like to know the secret history of that ride. How did the fifth passenger so impress his presence on his victims that they said no word when the coachman asked them whether they would like some coffee? Did he administer some narcotic on entering the coach, orthose were fighting days-was it by knocking them "out of time" that he "sent them to sleep?"

The issue is lapped in mystery, but much of the Bath Road lies beyond Colnbrook, where I have been pausing, and it is time to get along it. The fast coaches out of London soon covered the twenty-two miles to Reading, and there is no need for me to dawdle by the way. The purely coaching record is a

blank. There was, however, a fine inn at Slough, where there is now a draughty railway station; and at Salt Hill, six furlongs on, "The Windmill" was noted for its dinners. Here was also one of those unlimited establishments for the supply of posting horses, to be found years ago on all the great thoroughfares out of London. After crossing over Maidenhead Bridge the road enters Berkshire, and immediately afterwards the town of Maidenhead itself. An industrious curate, once resident in the town, has filled a large volume with its history; but there is nothing in it; and were it not that Royalty here first sets its foot on the road, we might hurry on to Maidenhead thicket, where we should have our purses taken. Such lot, at least, would in all likelihood have been ours, had we travelled in the good old days, and properly provided. The place had such a bad reputation so far

back as Elizabeth's time, that the Vicar of Hurley, who did duty at Maidenhead, drew an extra salary as amends for having to pass it.

In July, 1647, Charles the First was allowed, after several years separation, to see his children, and children and father met at Maidenhead, at the "Greyhound Inn." The meeting must have been a pathetic one, but the town was strewn with flowers and decked with green boughs. The united family, so soon to be so terribly divided, dined together, we read, and afterwards drove to Caversham. It must have been a pleasant journey that down the Reading Road, and would make, I think, a pretty picture; the king, with a sad smile on his fine face, pale from imprisonment, the children laughing and talking gaily, innocent of what the Fates were preparing unseen, the stern guard of Ironsides, not unmoved at the sight, riding grimly behind. I wonder what Charles and his children talked about on that historic journey. Not of past troubles, I suspect. Care had been too constant a companion of late years to be chosen as a topic. I daresay that the king, who knew his folk-lore and his Berkshire too - and who was a capital story teller, if we are to believe Mr. Wills-simply discussed the places of interest on the road, and acted as cicerone to his children. It would be a natural event at so critical a meeting, just as it was natural that Heine, after careful consideration of what he should say to Goethe when he met him, found when the crisis came that he could only talk about plums; and Charles, if he did discuss scenery had a subject. Half a mile south of Maidenhead, he might have pointed out the spire of Bray Church, and told his children the story of the immortal Vicar. Perhaps at his children's request, he sang them a song, or perchance a ballad, according to prescription, though I am not quite sure whether one was extant at the time-probably it wasn't. At any rate, the vicar alone would make a subject for an afternoon drive. There are few characters in English history that I admire more than the soft-hearted Simon Aleyn. genial churchman had seen some martyrs burnt; he thought the game was not worth the candle, and at the same time discovered in himself no particular penchant for martyrdom. The result was that he was a papist in Henry the Eighth's time, a protestant in Edward the Sixth's, a papist in Mary's, and in Elizabeth's a protestant again. I cannot sufficiently admire the genial adroitness of this bending to circumstance, or weary of considering what seas of precious blood might

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recantations and executing more important commissions, and his jolly ghost should haunt it still if ghosts were not like stage coaches--so hideously out of fashion; and Simon would be in good company, too, if he would walk, for the Bath Road is haunted, and by two of his contemporaries.

I shall have occasion later on to remark on the curious way in which Henry the Eighth's name has attached itself to certain counties, with which, if we are to credit historians, for want of other pastime, he had no earthly connection in life. It is not sur

prising, however, that between Windsor and Reading, the much married and much whitewashed king should be the hero of every tale. And it is of a ghost story of which he is particularly the moving spirit-a story which I shall tell here because it connects another royalty with the Bath Road.

In the days, then, when people used to sit round ingle benches and frighten each other with horrid tales to make an excuse for taking strong waters, travellers by night on the Bath Road used often to have a fright on this side of Reading. They met or rather were confronted with, confronted is the proper

word, two figures, with their faces set towards London. The usual preliminaries in the way of hair standing on end, eyes shooting out of sockets, horses trembling violently and then running away having been adjusted, the traveller looked at the apparitions and found one was a fat King in Lincoln green and the other a pale abbott extremely emaciated, having his hand pressed meaningly on the place where his supper ought to have been and clearly was not-under which presentment the two figures past on towards London, the king beckoning the churchman. So far so good. But what occurred when the apparitions in a marvellously short space of time were seen returning Reading-wards? Why, a change had come over the spirit of the dream and the order of the procession. The churchman rode first, and his complexion, so far as a ghost's can, had recovered all its roses-his face moreover had filled out and his priestly hands folded before him embraced a portly person. Behind him rode the fat king tossing a purse of gold and shaking his royal sides with paroxysms of ghostly inaudible laughter! The whole thing was a mystery.

Its key can be found in Fuller. It seems that Henry the Eighth one day lost his way out hunting, and as he had started the chase at Windsor, and found himself outside the Abbott of Reading's house at dinner-time, he must be allowed to have got some distance from his bearings. Clearly, however, the next thing was to dine, and this he did at the Abbott's table, the bat-eyed Churchman having taken him for one of the Royal Guard. A sirloin was produced and the king "laid on," much marked of the Abbott who had as much appetite as a peahen. When the roast had almost disappeared before the Royal onslaught, the Churchman could contain himself no longer.

"Well fare thy Heart," he exclaimed to the supposed man at arms, "for here in a cup of sack I remember thy master. I would give a hundred pounds on condition that I could feed as lustily on beef as you do. Alas! my weak and squeezie stomach will hardly digest the wing of a small rabbit or chicken." How cruel a case of dyspepsia in the Middle Ages! I recommend it to the notice of the faculty, as a proof that there is nothing new under the sun, not even in this "New disease that is stealing upon us all." Meanwhile the king pledged his host and departed. Some weeks after, the Abbott was committed to the Tower and fed for a short space on bread and water-a novel treatment for loss of appetite which threw the pious

patient into the most horrid dejection, "yet not so empty was his body of food as his mind was filled with fears as to how he had incurred the king's displeasure." At the very climax of this emptiness a sirloin of beef was set before him, when the good Abbott verified the proverb that two hungry meals make a glutton. He in point of fact rivalled the king's performance at Reading, and just as he was wiping his mouth, out jumped the king from a closet. "My Lord," quoth the king, "deposit presently your hundred pounds of gold, or else no going

This I believe to be the right interpretation of the vision of the two horsemen on the Reading road; which I hope will not be considered a digression from my subject, because the travellers are somewhat pale and insubstantial, and ride by us on ghostly old horses instead of in a spick and span fast day coach. Everything is a subject in my eyes provided that it has travelled on the road, and if Henry the Eighth and his patient travelled on it some time since, they have at all events brought me to Reading, which is thirty-eight miles seven furlongs

hence all the days of your life. I have been your physician to cure you of your squeezie stomach, and here as I deserve I demand my fee for the same." Too replete for repartee the Abbott "down with his dust," and presently returned to Reading as somewhat lighter in purse so much more merry in heart than when he came thence. I hope that when Henry the Eighth suppressed the monasteries he remembered that the good Abbott had got a renewed digestion, and left him something to buy beef with:-but it is probable that he didn't.

from Hyde Park Corner, and a third of the way to Bath.

Reading has a history like many other provincial towns which nobody has read of. That is to say the usual number of Parliaments have been held there at which no particular measures were passed. Queen Elizabeth visited it six times, but seems to have omitted to shoot a stag during her stays, there was a siege or two undertaken in the Civil Wars, and a Benedictine Abbey turned into a palace-the Abbey of the unfortunate Abbott. What is more to the purpose however, is

that here the Flying Machines of the early days of coaching inned, as they called it, after the first of their three days' journey to Bath, and the coaches of the palmy days changed horses. The Great Western Hotel now reigns of course instead of the Bear, the Crown, and the George; but it was at the latter signs that the passengers in the Flying Machine rested their jolted limbs on the sheets smelling of lavender that we have read of, and their more hurried descendants had just time to drink the great drink of a tumbler of fresh milk, one fair lump of sugar, two table spoonfuls of rum and just a thought of nutmeg grating on the top of all, a trifle that could be tossed off in a minute and so far as I can read was perpetu

whimsical, confronted Benjamin Child, Esq., Barrister-at-law-masked, rapier in hand and under the pale moonlight. The lady had refused numberless offers of marriage made in due form. Due forms however were her aversion, and so seem men to have been, till one fine day, when

"Being at a noble wedding

In the famous town of Reading,
A young gentleman she saw
Who belonged to the law."

In fact Benjamin Child, Esq. To him the lady sends a challenge unbeknownst, as Mrs. Gamp would say, to fight a mortal duel in Calcott Park. Nor did she trouble to assign any cause why Child-if such lot were to be

ally so being tossed off, before the guard applied "the yard of tin," to his lips and the four fresh horses whirled them off to Newbury.

I have said that the Bath Road has appealed to me as being more particularly the literary road than any of the other five great thoroughfares out of London. The next thirteen miles out of Reading go to bear out this view. They teem with literary and romantic recollections. Two miles out of Reading and on the right of the road is Calcott House, once the seat of the Berkshire Lady. In the pleasant park which lies in front of the square, formal-looking old house, the beautiful Miss Kendrick, the rich, the

his should be skewered like a chicken. This sounds like Dumas, but the barrister thought it meant business, and repaired to the place named sword in hand. He found the fair Miss Kendrick, masked, and still unbeknownst, awaiting him,

"So now take your chance,' says she,
'Either fight or marry me."

Said he, Madam, pray what mean ye?
In my life I ne'er have seen ye.'"

In fact he proposed point blank that she should unmask, not perhaps caring to take a pig in a poke. The lady, however, remained firm and incognito, when the intrepid Child, fortified perhaps by a view of Calcott House,