In April 1753 the “Birmingham and Shrewsbury Long Coach” began to ply between those places and London, completing the distance in three and a half days; fare 18s. Here, evidently, were several social grades; and when the Shrewsbury stage-coach of the same year, charging a guinea for an inside place, and the “Machine” of 1764, with a limited number of seats at 30s., each came on the scene, the several degrees of contempt with which all these classes of travellers, from those at twopence-farthing a mile down to those others at a penny-farthing, regarded one another and the lowest class, whose shilling a day or halfpenny a mile was the lowest common denominator in stage-waggon travelling, must have been curious certainly, if not edifying, to witness. The usual alternative of a halfpenny a mile or a shilling a day gives about twenty-four miles as a day’s journey for the common stage-waggon, and as the Flying Waggon was advertised to go at the rate of thirty miles a day, six miles a day was therefore the measure of the superiority in speed of one over the other. But the accumulated contempt of all those social scales for the occupant of the common waggon did not rest there, any more than it began with the passengers of the “Machine.” Just as the lordly and gentle folk who had travelled in their own chariots looked down even upon the loftiest heights of stage-coach travelling, so did the poor folk of the waggons unload their weight of contempt upon those poorest of the poor, who, having nothing to lose, feared no one--except perhaps the parish constable, apt to be arbitrary and not always able to distinguish between a penniless but honest wayfarer and a rogue and vagabond. Frequently these travellers in the lowest stratum saw the highwayman approach, not merely without fear but with a certain pleasurable anticipation; because your true knight of the road had a certain generous code of morals, and while he robbed the rich, gave to the needy--a thing perhaps counted to him for righteousness by that recording angel who effaced the record of Uncle Toby’s hasty imprecation with a kindly obliterating tear. [Illustration: THE STAGE-WAGGON, 1820. _After J. L. Agasse._ ]