We will conclude this chapter of accidents on this lighter and less sombre note, and tell how humour sometimes remained in the foreground even if the possibilities of tragedy lurked threatening in the rear. The tale used often to be told on the Exeter Road how, on one occasion, when Davis was driving the up “Quicksilver” Mail between Bagshot and Staines on a dark night, he ran into some obstruction, and the coach was upset into the adjoining field, fortunately a wet meadow. The “insides” were asleep at the time, and they naturally awoke in the wildest alarm. One, who did not grasp the situation, called out, “Coachman, coachman, where are we?” “By God, sir,” replied Davis, “I don’t know, for I was never here before in all my life!” Happily, nobody and nothing was hurt, and in twenty minutes the coach was away, making up for lost time. CHAPTER V A GREAT CARRYING FIRM: THE STORY OF PICKFORD AND CO. To the incurious public, who are as familiar with the name of “Pickford’s” as with that of their favourite morning newspaper, and to whom the sight of one of Pickford’s vans is a mere commonplace of daily life, this great carrying firm is just a part of our modern commercial system. To suggest to that favourite abstraction--the “average man”--so commonly cited, that Pickford’s is a firm whose origin is to be traced back two hundred and fifty or three hundred years would be a rash thing. He would tell you that this is a firm of railway carriers, and that, as railways are not yet a hundred years old, Pickford’s certainly cannot be two centuries older. Thus do later changes overlie and conceal earlier methods of business. Our average citizen would be wrong in two things: in his premisses, that the firm is wholly one of railway carriers; and in his conclusions, that it came into existence with railways themselves. The origin of Pickford’s is, indeed, lost in the mists that gather round the social and commercial life of the early seventeenth century; for the beginnings of the business go back to that time when the original firm of packhorse carriers was established, to whose trade the Pickfords succeeded, by purchase or otherwise, about 1730. Traditions only survive of those long-absorbed carriers, whose packhorse trains originally plied on the hilly tracks between Derby and Manchester “about two hundred and fifty or three hundred years ago,” as we vaguely learn. No documentary or other evidence exists on which to found an account of them. What would we not give to be able to recover from the romantic past the story of those old-time carriers, contemporary with the famous Hobson himself, beyond comparison the most celebrated of all these old men of the road!