London, posted across country to Ivetsey Bank, where they caught the Chester and London stage. With 1753 the continuous coaching history of Shrewsbury begins, in the starting of the “Birmingham and Shrewsbury Long Coach,” which journeyed to London in four days, by the efforts of six horses. The distance was 152 miles, the fare 18s. The “Long Coach” was a type of vehicle intermediate between the “Caravan” of 1750[C] and the “Machine,” established in April 1764. It was a cheap method of conveyance, one remove above the common stage-waggons. It set out once a week, and seems to have been so immediately successful that a rival and somewhat higher-class vehicle was put on the road as soon as the coachmakers could build it. It was in the June of that same year that the rival--“Fowler’s Shrewsbury Stage-coach” was the name of it--began to ply to and from London in three and a half days; fare, one guinea inside, outside half a guinea. Thus they continued to run for thirteen years, without the intrusion of a third competitor. We are not told how these outsides were carried. Probably they were obliged to cling to the sloping roof, on which the athletic and adventurous found a fearful joy with every roll and lurch, while those who were neither agile nor imbued with the spirit of adventure grew grey with apprehension. Indeed, it was probably the freak of some wild spirit--perhaps a sailor or a drunken soldier--in seating himself on the roof that first gave coach-proprietors the idea that roofs might be used to carry outsides as well as to shelter the august occupants of the interior. We may be allowed to imagine the arrival of the coach that first carried these freakish persons on that dangerous eminence, and to picture the joy of the proprietor, who thereupon determined that, as these pioneers for the fun of it had arrived safely, there must be a commercial value in places on the roof. The thing was done. Three outsides sat on the front part, with their feet on the back of the driving-box, while one had a place on the box-seat with the driver, and room was left for three more on the hind, and most inconvenient, part of the roof, where, like Noah’s dove, they found no rest for the soles of their feet, and had the greatest difficulty in maintaining their position. [C] P. 119.