“‘Half an hour for supper,’ exclaimed the waiter, as we pulled up at the ‘Crown.’ Down I got, entered the room, where there was a bright fire blazing, devoured some cold beef, drank a glass of hot brandy-and-water, and bravely went forth to face the elements. By this time the snow had increased, the wind had got up, and my heart failed. Back I rushed to the bar, ordered a bed, and remained there for the night, finishing my journey the following day. “Again, in coming from Bath by a night coach, I was so saturated with wet and shivering with cold that I got out at Reading, rushed to the ‘Bear,’ and slept there the night.” Such was the best travelling that money could buy in the days before England was--according to the coachmen--made a gridiron by the railways. CHAPTER VII SNOW AND FLOODS Severe weather, in the shape of frosts, thunderstorms, or hurricanes, was powerless to stop the coach-service, but exceptionally heavy snowfalls occasionally did succeed in doing so for very brief intervals; and floods, although they never were or could be so general as to wholly suspend coaching, often brought individual coaches to grief. In the severe winter of 1798–9, when snow fell heavily and continuously at the end of January and during the first week of February, several mails, missing on February 1st, were still to seek on April 27th, and St. Martin’s-le-Grand mourned them as wholly lost. By May Day, however, they did succeed in running again! Very few details survive of that exceptional season, or of that other, in 1806, when Nevill, a guard on the Bristol Mail, was frozen to death; but the records of the great snowstorm that began on the Christmas night of 1836 are very full. Christmas Day, 1836, fell on a Sunday, and it is worth notice, as a singular coincidence in this country of only occasional heavy snowfalls, that the Christmas night of 1886, also a Sunday night, exactly half a century later, was marked by that well-remembered snowstorm which disorganised the railway service quite as effectually as that of 1836 did the coaches, and broke down and destroyed nearly every telegraph-post and wire in the land.