Apply these feelings to the case of the coachmen who were born in an age that knew nothing of steam. Every stand-by was rooted up in the coming of railways, and the steam-engine was just as strange a monster to them as the electric dynamo is to many of ourselves. Often they could not transfer their allegiance to the railway, even though they starved. It was not always stubbornness or pride that held them aloof, but a certain and easily-understood lack of adaptability that forbade one who had held the reins to handle the starting-lever of the locomotive. More guards than coachmen transferred themselves from the road to the rail, because the duties were not so diverse; but, although there were coachmen who took positions on railways, no one has ever heard of one who became an engine-driver. But coachmen and guards and the passengers they drove are all passed away, and the world rolls on as though they had never existed. The coaches, like the old Manchester “Defiance,” shown in the picture, rotting away in the deserted inn-yard, were left to decay in unconsidered places or were reduced to firewood; unlike many of the old “Bull and Mouth” mails, which, after lying there for some time idle, were bought and shipped to Spain, running for many years on Peninsula roads, from Malaga in the south to Vittoria and Salamanca in the north, and by a singular fate visiting in their old age those blood-red fields of victory whose fame they had once spread from London all over triumphant England. CHAPTER XIII WHAT BECAME OF THE COACHMEN “Steam, James Watt, and George Stephenson have a great deal to answer for. They will ruin the breed of horses, as they have already ruined the innkeepers and the coachmen, many of whom have already been obliged to seek relief at the poor-house, or have died in penury and want.”--_The Times_, 1839.