The long-distance coaches--divided into the “day” and “night” varieties--started very early in the morning, or late in the afternoon. The midday aspect of such yards as Sherman’s “Bull and Mouth,” Chaplin’s “Swan with Two Necks,” the “Belle Sauvage,” the “Cross Keys,” the “Golden Cross,” and others was one of repose, but from unearthly hours in the forenoon until nine or ten, or from three o’clock in the afternoon until nine at night, they were the scenes of bustling activity. Any reference to old coaching time-bills will show that the majority of the day stage-coaches to places distant a hundred miles or more from London started about 6 a.m. Thus in 1824, among the coaches from London to Birmingham, eight are found timed from London between five and a quarter to eight in the morning; leaving the rest of the day blank until 3 p.m., when the earliest of the night coaches set out. The “Sovereign” went in 1824 from the “Bull,” Whitechapel, at 5 a.m. Half an hour later went the “Crown Prince” from the “Belle Sauvage,” and the “Aurora,” from the “Bull and Mouth”; followed by the “Courier,” from the “Swan with Two Necks,” and the “Light Coach” from the “Cross Keys” and “Golden Cross” at 6. At 6.30 went the “Oxonian Express” from the “Bull and Mouth”; the “Independent Tally-Ho,” from the “Golden Cross,” while “Mountain’s Tally-Ho,” from the “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, left at 7.45. In the same year the three early coaches for Bath left London at 5, 5.45, and 6.15 a.m. These hours, which we should nowadays regard as extravagantly early, were necessary if those coaches were to properly serve the roads they travelled, for even a fast coach, doing its 9 or 9½ miles an hour, including stoppages, would not reach Bath or Birmingham before the day had nearly closed. These unseasonable hours meant, of course, very early rising indeed for would-be passengers, and not even that hardy generation endured the infliction without a very great deal of grumbling. But there was no remedy. It was only a choice of ills, whether you had to be called at a little after three o’clock on perhaps a winter’s morning for a day’s journey, or whether you elected to wait until the afternoon, and so, travelling through the night, were deposited at your journey’s end on the pavements of Bath or Birmingham, or some other strange place, at the inhospitable hours between midnight and six a.m.; in which latter case you would be in that extremely unpleasant position of wanting to go to bed when the rest of the world was considering the expediency of getting out of it.