Our natural curiosity on that head cannot be satisfied, for the Parker correspondence ends abruptly there; but we fear the worst. Heading that testimony to the quality of early coach-travelling, we may find it not altogether without significance that from this year forward to 1667 little is heard of coaches. Perhaps those who gave the early ones a trial were glad to get back to their saddles and ride horseback again. However that may be, certainly coaching history, except by inference, is in those years a blank. We may infer services to other towns from oblique and scattered references, but direct information is lacking. That a stage-coach--or possibly more than one--was on the road between London and Norwich in 1665 is to be gathered from the proclamation issued in that East Anglian city on July 20th of that terrible year of the Great Plague, which destroyed half the population of London: “From this daie,” ran that ordinance, “all ye passage coaches shall be prohibited to goe from ye city to London, and come from thence hither, and also ye common carts and wagons.” Already, before that notice was issued, wayfarers from that doomed city had been struck down by the deadly and mysterious disease, and at Norwich itself travellers hailing from the centre of infection had died, swiftly and in circumstances that struck terror into the hearts of the people. Not that plagues were things unknown; for Hobson, the Cambridge carrier, had died from the vexation and enforced idleness of the Cambridge edict of 1631, forbidding intercourse with London, even then ravaged with an infectious disorder. What were the first stage-coaches like? If we are to credit Taylor’s description of the earliest coaches, some of them must have resembled the present Irish jaunting-car, or Bianconi’s mid-nineteenth century coaches, in the manner of carrying passengers. He tells us, in his fanciful way, that a coach, “like a perpetual cheater, wears two bootes and no spurs, sometimes having two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes (against nature) it makes faire ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are carried back to back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in that miserable manner, and thrown overboard into the sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate sea-crabs, in being drawn sideways, as they are when they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a dangerous kind of carriage for the commonwealth, if it be considered.” This boot, or this pair of boots--which did not in the least resemble, in shape or position, the fore and hind boots of a later age--was a method of carrying the outsides in days before the improvement of roads rendered it possible for any one to ride on the roof without incurring the danger of being flung off. No illustration of this type of coach has ever been found, but it seems possible that the back-to-back boots, to carry four, were built on to the hinder part of the coach, and really formed the first attempt to carry outsides.