The short-distance correspondence therefore paid from three to four times as much as under the old order of things, and long-distance letters a penny more; but all alike shared the advantage of the mail-coaches’ comparative immunity from attack and their going every day, including even Sundays. One class of correspondents, indeed, suffered inconvenience for a time while reorganisation was in progress. These were the residents on the bye-roads and in the smaller towns not situated on the great mail routes. It is obvious that the coaches could not be made to go along the secondary and very ill-kept roads, and that, even could that have been done, it would not have been possible, in the lack of passenger traffic along them, to have found contractors prepared to horse the coaches at the price they gladly accepted on the main arteries of travelling. The postboys had, on the other hand, gone everywhere, and the complex system of bye- and cross-posts established by Allen and maintained by these riders was really, for that time, a wonderful achievement. Residents off the mail routes now began to miss the postboy’s horn, and found their letters lying for days at the post-offices until they were called for. Instead of the post coming to the smaller towns and villages, those minor places had to send to the nearest post-office on the mail-coach road. These inconveniences only gradually disappeared on the organisation of a service of mail-carts from the post-towns to rural post-offices, collecting and delivering the cross-posts; and it was not until another ten years had passed that the bye-mails became, as well as the direct ones, what they should always have been, quicker than any other public conveyance on the roads. With this at length accomplished, the leakage of Post Office revenues automatically disappeared, for it is not to be supposed that, when the mails were more; frequent, cheaper, and more speedy than other methods, the public would resort to slow and more expensive ways of sending their letters. The next mail-coach to be put on the road was the Norwich Mail, in March 1785; and in May of that same year the first of the cross-road mails was established. This was the Bristol and Portsmouth. It was followed in rapid succession by the long services from London: the Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, on July 25th; the London, Gloucester and Swansea; the Hereford, Carmarthen and Milford Haven, by Glasbury; the Worcester and Ludlow; the Birmingham and Shrewsbury; the Chester and Holyhead; the Exeter; the Portsmouth; and--on October 16th, 1786, in answer to the petition for a mail-coach along the Great North Road sent up by the cities and towns on that highway--by the York and Edinburgh Mail.