It was in the very nature of their work that the “up” and “down” coachmen and guards should never meet, save in that moment of passing one another on the road. Like the little man and woman of the old-fashioned weather-gauge--the one coming out and the other going in, as fine or wet weather willed it--they could not, in the ordinary routine, possibly enjoy one another’s society. An exception was annually made on the Holyhead Road, when a hundred coachmen and guards were bidden to a feast at the “Green Man,” Dunchurch. They managed to find substitutes for their places on the box, or on the guard’s seat, for the occasion, and usually sat down to the half of a fat buck from the Buccleuch estate adjoining that village. The festival of September 1834 was a memorable one. According to a contemporary, the anticipation of the tuck-out had kept them on the _qui vive_ for a week, and it was not a little amusing to see them nearing the point of attraction on the evening and night before; in some cases two, and even three, being perched on one coach and making the welkin ring with notes of their bugles, in solos, duets, or trios, to the no small interruption of the peaceful slumbers of wayside hamlets, whose inhabitants, from the constant din of “See the Conquering Hero Comes,” fancied the Duke of Wellington, at least, was on the road. The guards of the Manchester “Red Rover” were particularly on their stilts, and, having met for the first time on the same vehicle in musical fellowship, continued practising every tune they did know and did not know, from the time they quitted Highgate until they entered Dunchurch, at about 3 a.m., when they took leave of the coach with the splendid finale of “We Won’t go Home till Morning,” leaving the harassed passengers with the chance of an odd wink for the remainder of the journey. “We ought,” says the historian of these things, “as faithful reporters, to state that Bob Hadley and his chum on the ‘Rover’ occasionally rested their pipes with a cigar or a song; and in the latter attempt Hadley was certainly second best, for no raven in a chimney-pot could have more barbarously murdered the airs of Rossini--so much to the horror of a lady outside, who was herself a bit of a musician, that she fancied she had by accident got upon the railway, and taken her seat in a cattle train, in one of the private boxes set apart for the accommodation of four-footed squeakers.”