Read it through once

It had been arranged that William should don his betting toggery at the "Spread Eagle Inn." It stood at the cross-roads, only a little way from the station--a square house with a pillared porch. Even at this early hour the London pilgrimage was filing by. Horses were drinking in the trough; their drivers were drinking in the bar; girls in light dresses shared glasses of beer with young men. But the greater number of vehicles passed without stopping, anxious to get on the course. They went round the turn in long procession, a policeman on a strong horse occupied the middle of the road. The waggonettes and coaches had red-coated guards, and the air was rent with the tooting of the long brass horns. Every kind of dingy trap went by, sometimes drawn by two, sometimes by only one horse--shays half a century old jingled along; there were even donkey-carts. Esther and Sarah were astonished at the number of costers, but old John told them that that was nothing to what it was fifty years ago. The year that Andover won the block began seven or eight miles from Epsom. They were often half-an-hour without moving. Such chaffing and laughing, the coster cracked his joke with the duke, but all that was done away with now.