Of course, this good advice and insistence upon its being followed would have been of little avail had the author of it not been continually alert to see that his instructions took root. _He_, at any rate, practised what he preached, and rose early, was diligent all day, and went late to bed. As a business man whose business was conducted over a large stretch of country--extending chiefly in a diagonal line two hundred miles long, between London and Liverpool--he knew that only by personal supervision and by great and unwearied exertions in travelling could his subordinates be kept in a state of efficiency; and he accordingly was always travelling. By post-chaise or by private carriage he flew, day and night, along the great roads between London and Holyhead, and London, Derby, Manchester and Liverpool; appearing, suddenly and unexpectedly, at some great town-warehouse of the firm, or some wayside office or place of call, and often springing, as it were, out of the void, to encourage some diligent servant, or (it is to be feared) more often to reprimand a lazy and inefficient one. None could predicate his movements or where he might be at any given time; save indeed those with whom he had made appointments, and they knew, after only a short acquaintance, that the sun was scarce more likely to rise and set according to the calendar than Joseph Baxendale was to redeem his promise of any such assignation. Forsaking for awhile the roads and his establishments along them, he would next appear on the canals of whose sullen waters his fly-boats flew, and pay flying visits of inspection to the many wharves along their course. These water expeditions were made in a vessel especially constructed--a “canal-yacht” called the _Lark_, whether significantly named in allusion to the early-rising habits of its owner we do not know. It was this boat, according to the still surviving tradition, he lent to the Earl of Derby on an occasion when Lady Derby was in London, too ill to travel by road to Knowsley, where, according to the doctor’s advice, she should be removed. In it she travelled all the way down to Lancashire, along the canals. Another surviving tradition, and one that speaks well for the quality of the horses that drew the fly-boats--and perhaps even better for the keenness of the sporting instincts of the official concerned---tells how Mr. Baxendale, on coming to Braunston, a Northamptonshire village on the Grand Junction Canal, discovered that the man who should have been in charge of his wharf there had gone hunting, mounted on one of the firm’s towing-path steeds. Records of that time do not tell us of that sportsman’s return, or of the reception that met him.