The fastest coaches were the "Defiance" (Edinburgh and Aberdeen), the "Wonder" (Shrewsbury and London), for which alone 150 horses were kept, and the mail from Liverpool to Preston. The next fastest were the Holyhead, Exeter, and Scotch mails, and those to Bath and Bristol (which last ones did not stop for meals on the road). The slowest is the Stroud mail, but formerly was the Worcester mail, which used to be most frequently overturned of any. The Hastings and Brighton mails had only two horses. For some reason or other, with which I am not acquainted, the Liverpool mail, and, I believe, the Halifax also, though leaving London at the same time as the others, had a day coach on the up journey, arriving at St. Martin's-le-Grand about 7 p.m. One of the Birmingham coaches was lighted by gas for a time, as far back as 1834. A coach running every day between London and Birmingham paid annually for toll-gates the sum of £1,428. The double miles of the mails travelling reached at one time 6,619 a journey. SCOTCH AND IRISH MAILS. It is interesting to compare the running of the Edinburgh and Glasgow coaches out of London. Both left St. Martin's at the same hour, but by a different road. At Alconbury (65 miles out of London) the two coaches must have frequently been in sight of each other on a moonlight night--if punctual a bare four minutes divided them (not a yokel in that part of Huntingdonshire but could discuss the merits of the rival whips)--and at Grantham (108 miles out) they probably transferred some mail bags picked up upon their different roads. At Doncaster (159 miles from London) less than a quarter of an hour divided the two vehicles after travelling all through the night and portion of the following day, a feat successfully performed that would make the hair of a modern South-Eastern Railway guard stand upon end. Indeed, tradition says that the up and down coaches nearly always "crossed" within a few yards of the same bridge. Even that northern metropolis, Newcastle, was treated with scant ceremony; as soon as fresh horses were attached and the mail bags exchanged, the coach went forward without pause, the next "stop and examine coach" after York being at Belford (near Berwick-upon-Tweed). With the Edinburgh coach there were three halts only upon the road for refreshments, and these were liable to curtailment in heavy weather when any minutes had been lost on the way--at the ordinary stages the changes of horses being sometimes made in less than a minute.