Chaplin horsed the quickest mails out of London: the Devonport, the New Holyhead, the Bristol, and five other West-country mails starting from Piccadilly. Passengers who had booked from his City offices were carried to this point by omnibuses he established, and the mails were conveyed, with the guards, in two-wheeled mail-carts from the General Post Office. In the great number of coaches he ran there were, of course, included some of the very best. His were those famous coaches, the Manchester “Defiance,” a rival of Sherman’s even more famed Manchester “Telegraph,” the Birmingham “Greyhound,” the Cambridge “Telegraph,” Liverpool “Red Rover,” Bristol “Emerald,” Cheltenham “Magnet,” and many others doing their ten miles and more an hour. He also had half-shares in the brilliant “Tantivy,” London and Birmingham, the “Stamford Regent,” the Southampton “Comet,” and others. The signs of the times, so patent to outsiders from 1830 and onwards, but generally hid from the vision of those most interested, were not unheeded by this remarkably shrewd business man, who, like his contemporary, Joseph Baxendale, had the power of seeing things and the possible future trend of affairs from an impersonal and unprejudiced point of view. He, above all other coach-proprietors, was deeply interested in the continuance of the old order of things, and it would not have been remarkable had he brought himself to the illogical conclusion that, because he was so interested, the old order must, could, should and would be maintained. Many other coach-proprietors _did_ arrive at such a conclusion, not, of course, by process of reasoning, but by force of being habitually engaged in a business that prejudiced their minds against steam and machinery. Their first instincts of scorn for anything that should presume to replace the horse effectually blinded them to the reality of the coming change.