The great roads over Dartmoor were not completed until about 150 years ago. One of them runs north-eastward from Plymouth to Moreton, and so to Exeter and London, and the other runs south-eastward from Tavistock to Ashburton. They cross each other at Two Bridges in the middle of the moor, and at some points they are nearly 1500 feet above the level of the sea. About three miles out from Moreton on the Plymouth road there is a road from Ashburton to Chagford; and at the crossing of these roads the highwaymen were hanged in chains, when caught. At least, my father and my grandfather both told me so; and such things might have happened even in my father’s time, as hanging in chains was not abolished until 1834. In the old days of practical joking it was one of the stock jokes to go out to some cross-road in the middle of the night, dig up the sign-post, turn it round a right-angle, and fix it down again with its arms all pointing the wrong way. There were two men whom I remember very well--old friends of my father’s--and he told me that these two did this on Dartmoor several times, usually in snowstorms, as the snow soon covered up all traces of their work. But he thought the best part of the joke was in their going out on the bleak moorland in the snow to do a thing like that. It certainly was no joke riding out at night with a pair of lanterns fixed on underneath your stirrups to guide you in the dark. But travelling by coach was not so very much better. In his diary down here, Friday 5 February 1836, my father notes--“snow up the country, so that the Tuesday coaches could not come in until Thursday.” Writing to him from London after a journey up, 7 April 1839, an old friend of his exclaims--“Oh that Salisbury Plain, thirty-five miles of a wet windy night outside a coach, by god, sir, ’tis no joke.” The same friend writes to him from Sidmouth, 11 January 1841, after coming from Southampton to Honiton by coach--“We had six horses nearly all the way, and soon after passing Ringwood (I believe it was) our road was covered with and cut thro’ snow which was at least four feet deep on each side.... We got capsized into a high bank on descending one hill, but it was managed so very quietly that we were not thrown off and were able to dismount quietly and get the coach properly on her legs again.” On the London and Exeter coaches the tips came to about a quarter of the fare: one to the guard, three to the drivers--drivers being changed at the supper and breakfast stops--and two to the ostlers at each end. On the 14 July 1839 my father writes to my grandfather that railway fares are comparatively low and no ‘fees,’ that is, tips: also that the ‘first rate’ carriages are good.