This was not by any means the sum of Stevenson’s improvements. The usual guard he replaced by a liveried servant, whom he caused to attend upon the passengers, when the coach changed horses, with silver sandwich-box and offers of sherry of a kind that appealed even to the jaded palates of connoisseurs. Stevenson was as excellent a whip as he was a good-hearted gentleman. “I am not aware,” wrote “Viator Junior,” “if, to quote a vulgar saying, he was ‘born with a silver spoon in his mouth,’ but I certainly think he must have been brought into the world with a whip and reins in his hand, for in point of ease and elegance of execution as a light coachman he beats nineteen out of twenty of the regular working dragsmen into fits, and as an amateur is only to be approached by two or three of the chosen few.” Of course, coaching on these luxurious terms resulted in a staggering loss, and could not long have continued, but even those short possibilities were ended by the early death of Stevenson. The cause of the attack of brain-fever that ended his career early in 1830 is imperfectly known, and is merely said to have been “an accident.” The last scene was pathetic beyond the ordinary. Exhausted at the end of delirium, the bandages that had held his arms were removed, when, feebly raising himself up in bed and assuming as well as he was able his old habitual attitude upon the box, he exclaimed, as if with the reins in his hand, and to his favourite servant, who usually stood at his leaders’ heads, “Let them go, George; I’ve got ’em!” and so sank down, dying, upon his pillow, in the happy delusion of being once more upon the road. Mr. Harry Foker and others of the “young Oxonians” or “young Cantabs” with more taste for driving four-in-hand than knowledge of that very difficult art, were frequent aspirants for the ribbons, and as they were generally flush of money and free with it, they often tasted the delights of tooling a coach along the highway. Professional coachmen on the Oxford and Cambridge roads reaped a bounteous crop of half-guineas by resigning the reins into these hands, but equally plentiful was the harvest of bruises and shocks gathered by the passengers as a result of their reckless or unskilled driving. These chartered libertines of the road are mentioned with horror by travellers in the first half of the nineteenth century, who have pictured for us four horses galloping at the incredible speed of twenty miles an hour, and the coaches rocking violently, while the “outsides” hold on like firemen, behind some uncertificated young cub from Oxford or Cambridge, or, anticipating the final cataclysm, drop off behind or dive into the hedges. [Illustration: THE CONSEQUENCE OF BEING DROVE BY A GENTLEMAN. _After H. Alken._ ]