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Thames Advertiser, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8366, 29 February 1896, Page 3

. The old stage coach London hosluliy, Ihu JJlepliant mid Castle, was in its time famous as a public resort. Its glories are now gone wider the now conditions of life in London, ami tho Savoy, the Bristol, the Charing Cross, and other palatial hotels replete with luxury and comfort are very diD'erent from the White Lions, Bed Bulls, and Criterions of the early years of the present ceutury. Let us picture the bar parlour of the old Klcphant mid Castle, say after tho battle of Waterloo, where the genius of the Duke of Wellington overthrew by the aid of British bayonets and the Prussians under Bluchcr, the great conqueror Napoleon JJonaiiarte. Burly red-faced fanners from* the midlands, the dapper little keen wheat-buyer from JJark Lane, the wholesale carcase butcher, tho dealer in hunters and roadsters apd others of that ilk, all in harmony threshing out the talk of the day over their mugs of alo, when in comes the old stage coachman after a long journey. Not being gifted with much conversational powers and with a consciousness of inferiority in this respect he takes up the newspaper as an excuse for silence notwithstanding the difficulty that he was unable to read. In those days the mail coach was pictured in an illustration, and the paper being held upside down, it is easy to under* slauu tho horror of tho old coachman, who exclaimed, "Here's a big accident, a coach capsized," and the roar of tho delighted company when they learned tho nature of that capsize, und tho puzzled look on the coachman's face, who cannot understand where the joke comes in. How different is convivial life now to those old times. Instead of the long church-warden pipes, wo havo the beautiful and fragrant Vanity Fair Cigarette, the perfection of quality uud tho. pother of worried humanity,