Coaches and coach horses are not the only things which have disappeared from our high roads. One of the things to be met with on the roads in 1800-20 was the velocipede. It was not unlike in form the "Safety" bicycle which is so universally met with on our roads to-day, with a trifling difference which made long and rapid journeys out of the question. The fact is the mechanical genius of Englishmen, which has made such enormous strides during the century, had not then found out that it was possible to use the solid earth as a fulcrum and at the same time to leave the feet and legs free. A horse used its feet to draw a coach and why not a man! So the velocipede was constructed for the rider's feet to just reach the ground, and by pressing first one foot on the ground and then the other he managed in this undignified attitude, to propel the thing along! {153} Another characteristic thing about the old locomotion was the dog cart--small carts used by pedlars and others drawn along the high roads by a dog or dogs. Sometimes these old pedlars would drive to Royston market with their "carriage and pair" of dogs in rattling style! This sight was very common during the last century and lingered to about the end of the coaching days. In the _Gentleman's Magazine_, for 1795, a writer says: "I have sometimes seen two dogs yoked one on each side of a barrow drawing regularly and well, similar to ploughing. Their feet being tender, to prevent their being foot-sore, they should have some sort of shoeing; perhaps leather would be properest." So well established had the use of dogs for drawing carts become that the subject came before Parliament about fifty years ago. An old magazine of this date gives a kind of petition to Parliament, drawn up by a village schoolmaster and signed by three small hucksters, setting forth, like the three historic tailors of Tooley Street, the injured sense of the "people of England" at the prospect of an interference with the use of dogs, and praying for the suppression of horses and the protection of the small trader's dog, "because the dog carts of poor people were continually, almost, and sometimes quite, run over by these rough beasts [horses], and that this tyranny and wilfulness is very difficult for the poor man to bear, who may have as good a spirit as any coachman, although he is not so high up"! From as late as about 1855 there comes to the writer a vision of a pedlar, muddled with drink, riding home in his little square box cart and the faithful dog drawing the cart and the man as well, and also a faint echo of "shame" from some bystanders. Verily the fable must in those days have been true, that when the goddess Fidelity was lost among men, after long searching, she was found in a dog-kennel!