Sturdy survivals of olden days are the local delicacies that first obtained a wider fame from that time when they were set before the coach passengers at the country inns where the coach dined, or had tea, or supped, and were so greatly appreciated that supplies were carried away for the benefit of distant friends. Some, however, of these delicacies have disappeared. No longer does Grantham produce the cakes mentioned by Thoresby in 1683. Grantham, he says, was “famous in his esteem for Bishop Fox’s benefactions, but it is chiefly noted of travellers for a peculiar sort of thin cake, called ‘Grantham Whetstones.’” What precisely were the cakes known by this unpromising name we cannot say, for the making of them is a thing of the past. Stilton cheese, never made at Stilton, obtained its name exactly in the manner already described. It was a cheese made at Wymondham, in Leicestershire, but its merits were first discovered by the coach-parties who dined at the “Bell” at Stilton, whose landlord obtained his supply from Wymondham, and drove a roaring trade in old cheeses sold to the coaches to take away. “Stilton” cheese is now only a conventional name, like that of “Axminster” carpets, made nowadays at Kidderminster. To bring home with him bags and boxes of local delicacies was to the old coach-traveller as much an earnest of his travels as the bringing back of a storied alpenstock is to the tourist in Switzerland. The Londoner, returning home from Edinburgh, could come back laden with a number of things which, easily obtainable now, were then the spoils only of travel. From Scotch shortbread the list would range to Doncaster butterscotch, York hams, Grantham gingerbread, and Stilton cheeses. On other roads he might secure the cloying Banbury cake, still extant, and as sickly-sweet and lavish of currants as of yore; the famous Shrewsbury cakes, manufactured by the immortal Pailin, who left his recipe behind him, so that the cakes of Shrewsbury still continue in the land; Bath buns, phenomenally adhesive and sprinkled with those fragments of loaf sugar without which the exterior of no Bath bun is complete; the cheese of Cheddar; the toffee of Everton; pork pies from Melton Mowbray; or a barrel of real natives from Whitstable. All or any of these, I say, he might carry home with him, while few places were so unimportant in this particular way that he could not ring the changes on gastronomic rarities as he went.