Charles Dickens: The Uncommercial Traveller

24. CHAPTER XXIV--AN OLD STAGE-COACHING HOUSE (continued)

It was now my turn to say 'Oh!' and I said it. Not another word did the dry and grizzled man say, but bent to his work again. In the coach-making days, the coach-painters had tried their brushes on a post beside him; and quite a Calendar of departed glories was to be read upon it, in blue and yellow and red and green, some inches thick. Presently he looked up again.

'You seem to have a deal of time on your hands,' was his querulous remark.

I admitted the fact.

'I think it's a pity you was not brought up to something,' said he.

I said I thought so too.

Appearing to be informed with an idea, he laid down his plane (for it was a plane he was at work with), pushed up his spectacles again, and came to the door.

'Would a po-shay do for you?' he asked.

'I am not sure that I understand what you mean.'

'Would a po-shay,' said the coachmaker, standing close before me, and folding his arms in the manner of a cross-examining counsel-- 'would a po-shay meet the views you have expressed? Yes, or no?'

'Yes.'

'Then you keep straight along down there till you see one. YOU'LL see one if you go fur enough.'

With that, he turned me by the shoulder in the direction I was to take, and went in and resumed his work against a background of leaves and grapes. For, although he was a soured man and a discontented, his workshop was that agreeable mixture of town and country, street and garden, which is often to be seen in a small English town.