None among the servants of the public earned their living more hardly, or took greater risks in the ordinary way of business, than the coach proprietors. It was a business in which the few--the very few--became rich, and the majority lived a strenuous life, with empty pockets at the end of it. It was very truly said of them, as a class, that they lived hard, worked hard, swore hard, and died hard. To this was sometimes added that they held hard, by which you are to understand that what money they _did_ succeed in getting they grasped tightly. This last was, however, by no means a characteristic of the majority, who very often dissipated what they had made by successful ventures on one road by disastrous competition on another. There was never a more speculative business than that of a coach-proprietor, and never one so cursed with insane competition. Why embittered rivalries of this kind should have been more common on the road than in any other line is only to be explained by the hypothesis that a certain element of sporting emulation entered into it; and a kind of foolish pride that impelled a man to put and keep a line of coaches on a road to “nurse” a rival, not always with the hope of earning a profit for himself, but with the idea of cutting up another man’s ground. The most outstanding figure among coach-proprietors was that of William Chaplin. He towered above all his contemporaries in the magnitude of his business, and was, when railways came to destroy it, first among those few who saw the folly of opposing steam, and were both acute enough and sufficiently fortunate to reap an additional advantage from the new order of things, instead of being ruined by it, as many less fortunate and less far-seeing men were. [Illustration: MAIL-COACH HALFPENNY ISSUED BY WILLIAM WATERHOUSE.]