- Our friendly narrator sets the scene: it’s a Friday night in November. We’re on the Dover road.
- This should spark some bells for anyone who spent the summer traveling around Europe.
- Long, long ago, in the years before the Chunnel was built, people who wanted to travel to France took a boat from Dover to Calais.
- Based on this information, we’re guessing that we’re about to see some traveling going on. It’s just a hunch.
- Anyhow, we zoom in on a guy who’s supposed to be traveling by mail coach to Dover.
- A mail coach is a coach that, well, carries mail. And people. It’s drawn by horses.
- We say that he’s supposed to be in the coach because, at the moment, he’s walking in the mud alongside it.
- In fact, all of the passengers on the coach are walking beside it. In the mud. And no one’s all that happy about it.
- The horses, you see, have gotten bogged down in the mud.
- Since this is long before the time of cars (and long, long before planes or nice, clean trains), the passengers don’t have any choice but to hop out and walk.
- Besides being muddy, it's cold and foggy and altogether disgusting.
- The longer we think about it, the less we understand why anybody would want to travel to Dover at all.
- Finally, the coachman manages to push the horses up to the top of the muddy hill. By the time they climb up it, it’s almost 10:00.
- All of a sudden, the coachman (we’ll call him Joe, since that's his name) hears horses’ hooves pounding in the distance.
- A rider is following them!
- Everyone stops and listens as a horse draws up to the carriage.
- The rider of the horse asks for Mr. Jarvis Lorry.
- A small man answers. He seems to think that the rider’s name is Jerry.
- As it turns out, this is because the rider’s name is Jerry. We’re starting to trust this Mr. Lorry already.
- Jerry gives Mr. Lorry a letter.
- All of the other passengers eye Jerry suspiciously. Now that Mr. Lorry’s got a letter from Jerry, they eye him suspiciously, too.
- Mr. Lorry assures Joe that there’s nothing wrong. He (Mr. Lorry) is from Tellson’s Bank in London.
- Mentioning the name of Tellson’s seems to do the trick. All of a sudden, everyone trusts Mr. Lorry.
- He reads the note that Jerry handed to him, and tells Jerry to ride back to London to deliver one message: "Recalled to Life."
- Sound interesting? Just wait. It is!
- The coach starts off again (this time with the passengers on the inside).
- As it travels, Joe remarks to Tom (another passenger) that the message Mr. Lorry gave to Jerry was rather cryptic.
- Tom agrees. They puzzle over it for the rest of the journey.