With a comfortable carriage, and the personal effects of the occupants strapped on behind it, posting to London was one of the pleasant incidents of the year to those who had leisure and money at command. Repeated season after season, the journey brought the travellers into close acquaintance with every district through which the public road passed. They had a far greater familiarity with the details of these districts than can now be formed in railway journeys. They knew every village, church, and country-house to be seen along the route, and could mark the changes made in them from year to year. At the inns, where they halted for the night, they were welcomed as old friends, and made to feel themselves at home. This pleasant mode of travelling, so graphically described in _Humphry Clinker_, continued in use among some county families long after the stage-coaches had reached the culmination of their speed and comfort. My old friend, T. F. Kennedy of Dunure, used to describe to me the delights of these yearly journeys in his youth. Posting into England did not die out until after the completion of the continuous railway routes, when the failure of travellers on the road led to the giving up of post-horses at the inns. [Sidenote: STAGE-COACHES TO LONDON] One of my early recollections is to have seen the London coaches start from Princes Street, Edinburgh. Though railways were beginning to extend rapidly over England, no line had yet entered Scotland, so that the first part of the journey to London was made by stage-coach. There was at that time no line of railway, with steam locomotives, leading out of Edinburgh. Stage-coaches appear to have been tried between London and Edinburgh as far back as 1658, for an advertisement published in May of that year announces that they would ‘go from the George Inn without Aldersgate to Edinburgh _in Scotland_, once in three weeks for £4 10s., with good coaches and fresh horses on the roads.’ In May, 1734, a coach was advertised to perform the journey between Edinburgh and London ‘in nine days, or three days sooner than any other coach that travels the road.’ An improvement in the service, made twenty years later, was thus described in an advertisement which appeared in the _Edinburgh Evening Courant_ for July 1st, 1754: