"THE GREEN MAN" made to say, "Comes there a pageant by? Then I'll stand out of the green man's way." I find also, in Dr. Brewer's Handbook of Allusions, an extract given from a play of a year later, entitled, The Seven Champions of Christendom, which runs as follows:—"Have you any squibs, or green man in your shows?" During the next century, and for some time afterwards, gamekeepers were usually clad in green, a fact noted by Crabbe:
But the green man shall I pass by unsung?. . .
A squire's attendant clad in keeper's green.
At one or other of these two once famous hostels the old coaches took their first change out, or their last change in, and not much time was allowed for or lost in the changing either; for if our ancestors, according to modern notions, made haste slowly, at least they made all the haste they knew. The now quiet (except at the time of the noted horse fair) Barnet High Street was then astir all the day long and half the night with the coming and going of coaches, to say nothing of "posters," and the road-*way rang with the rattle and clatter of fast travelling teams, the air was resonant with the musical echoes of the frequent horn, whilst the hurried shout of "next change" kept the inn-yards alive and ready, the ostlers alert. Steam has changed all this; now we travel more speedily but less picturesquely, more luxuriously but less romantically. Why, the very meaning of the word travel—derived, my dictionary informs me, from "travail; excessive toil"—has surely wholly lost its signification in this easy-going
