All of the "Coverley" series came out in the _English Illustrated_. So also did the designs for the next book, the _Coaching Days and Coaching Ways_ of Mr. Outram Tristram, 1888. Here Mr. Thomson had a topographical collaborator, Mr. Herbert Railton, who did the major part of the very effective drawings in this kind. But Mr. Thomson's contributions may fairly be said to have exhausted the "romance" of the road. Inns and inn-yards, hosts and ostlers and chambermaids, stage-coachmen, toll-keepers, mail-coaches struggling in snow-drifts, mail-coaches held up by highwaymen, overturns, elopements, cast shoes, snapped poles, lost linch-pins,--all the episodes and moving accidents of bygone travel on the high road have abundant illustration, till the pages seem almost to reek of the stableyard, or ring with the horn.[30] And here it may be noted, as a peculiarity of Mr. Thomson's conscientious horse-drawing, that he depicts, not the ideal, but the actual animal. His steeds are not "faultless monsters" like the Dauphin's palfrey in _Henry the Fifth_. They are "all sorts and conditions" of horses; and--if truth required it--would disclose as many sand-cracks as Rocinante, or as many equine defects (from wind-gall to the bolts) as those imputed to that unhappy "Blackberry" sold by the Vicar of Wakefield at Welbridge Fair to Mr, Ephraini Jenkinson. Note: [30] Sometimes a literary or historical picture creeps into the text. Such are "Swift and Bolingbroke at Backlebury" (p. 30); "Charles II. recognised by the Ostler" (p. 144), and "Barry Lyndon cracks a Bottle" (p. 116). _Barry Lyndon_ with its picaresque note and Irish background, would seem an excellent contribution to the "Cranford" series. Why does not Mr. Thomson try his hand at it? He has illustrated _Esmond_, and the _Great Haggarty Diamond_.