Many a hairbreadth escape have I had from one of these breakneck vehicles. When at a private tutor's at Donnington, I and a young companion--alas! now no more--hired a tandem from Botham, of the "Pelican," Newbury, to take us to Reading. Safely should we have arrived there but for a drove of oxen which met us on our way. The result was the accident related in a previous chapter, and my ankle was dislocated. My next attempt was when I was on the Staff of the Duke of Wellington, at Cambrai. Frederick Yates, then in the Commissariat Department, afterwards lessee of the Adelphi Theatre, was anxious, like myself, to visit an amateur performance by the officers stationed at Valenciennes; and it was arranged that we should drive over in my dennet, to which he was to add a leader. All went well until we approached the plains of Denain, when a man leading a dancing bear so frightened our steeds that they set off at a gallop, overturning us in a dry ditch. Unfortunately for me, the handle of my sword, which I had stowed away in front of the apron, came in contact with my body and broke a rib; so, instead of enjoying my visit, I was laid up for a week at a not over-comfortable hotel. This was my second and last appearance in a tandem, and I strongly recommend those who value their limbs never to trust themselves to such a conveyance. In earlier days I have driven four horses many hundred miles on the road and through the crowded streets of the metropolis, and never once came to grief. Let me now refer to the use of wheel carriages in towns, which is not of very ancient date among the English people. During the reign of James I. the drivers of both public and private carriages had no other accommodation than a bar, or driver's chair, placed very low behind the horses; in the following reign they rode postilion fashion. After the Restoration they appeared with whip and spurs, and towards the end of the century mounted a coachman's box. This box, covered with a hammer-cloth, was in reality a box, and within it, or in a leather pouch attached to it, were tools for mending broken wheels or shivered panels, in the event of accidents occurring, which were by no means uncommon; in consequence, first, of the defective construction of the vehicles, which, according to Davenant, were "uneasily hung, and so narrow that he took them for sedans on wheels;" in the second place, from the clumsy driving of carmen in the crowded thoroughfares; and, lastly and principally, from the nature of the streets themselves, full of all the worst perils a coachman could have to encounter. The state of the street ways, where the ruts lay half a yard deep, did not admit of rapid driving, and we read, even in the days of Charles II., of the Royal coach being upset twice in getting from the City to Westminster.