The end was not yet, but the Lynn “Union” was off the road in 1847, and Cross could not obtain any form of employment on the railway. He had already, in 1846, petitioned Parliament, but without avail; and now entered upon those unhappy years in which he eked out a precarious existence on the occasional aid given him by such men as Henry Villebois, the good-hearted Norfolk sporting squire, and others who had often been passengers on the box-seat of the “Union.” In those years he published several pieces in verse, generally cast in the ambitious epic form. Unfortunately, he was not the poet he thought himself, and they are rather turgid and bombastic specimens of blank verse. He planned and wrote a _History of Coaching_, but in the bankruptcy of his printers the manuscript disappeared, and so what might have proved a really valuable work was lost. At last, in 1865, he found a home in Huggens’ College, a charitable institution at Northfleet, founded and endowed some twenty years earlier by a wealthy City merchant for gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances. This testimony to his social superiority above other coachmen seems to have cheered and invigorated him amazingly, for he was a collegian at Huggens’ beneficent institution for twelve years, and lived to be nearly eighty-six years of age. Less fortunate was Jack Peer, or Peers, of the Southampton “Telegraph,” famous in his day, but reduced to driving an omnibus, and thence, being morose and quarrelsome in that position, by degrees to the workhouse. His unhappy situation became known to a gentleman who had often travelled by him in brighter times: a handsome subscription was raised, and he was at least enabled to end his days in quiet retirement. A great many ex-coachmen became innkeepers and publicans. Among these was Ambrose Pickett, of the Brighton “Union” and “Item,” who anticipated the end of Brighton coaching in 1841, by becoming landlord of an inn in North Street, with the very appropriate sign of the “Coach and Horses.” A much more famous coachman than he--Sam Hayward, of the Shrewsbury “Wonder”--followed Mr. Weller’s example, and married a widow, landlady of the “Raven and Bell,” on Wyle Cop; but he did not long survive the extinction of “the Road,” and the widow soon found herself again in that situation. John Jobson, who for many years drove the “Prince of Wales”--the “Old Prince,” as it was familiarly called--a London, Oxford and Birmingham coach, continued on to Shrewsbury and Holyhead--became a coach-proprietor, established at the “Talbot,” Shrewsbury, and a thorn in the side of Isaac Taylor, of the neighbouring “Lion.” Coaching came to an end at Shrewsbury in 1842, and the name of Jobson was heard no more.