How do those numbers compare with the number of trains run daily to Cambridge in our own time? It is not altogether a fair comparison, because the capacities of a coach and of a railway train are so radically different. Twenty-nine trains run by all routes from London to Cambridge, day by day, and they probably, on an average, set down five hundred passengers between them at the joint station. Taking the average way-bill of a coach to contain ten passengers, the daily arrivals at Cambridge were a hundred and sixty, or, adding twenty post-chaises daily with two passengers each, a hundred and eighty. These are only speculative figures, but, unsupported by exact data though they must be, they give an approximation to an idea of the growth of traffic between those times and these. The imagination refuses to picture this daily host being conveyed by road. It would have meant some thirty-five coaches, fully laden, and as for goods and general merchandise, the roads could not possibly have sufficed for the carrying of them. V COACHING on the road from London to Lynn has found some literary expression in the _Autobiography of a Stage Coachman_, the work of Thomas Cross, published in 1861. Cross was a remarkable man. Born in 1791, he may fairly be said to have been born to the box-seat, his father, John Cross, having been a mail-contractor and stage-coach proprietor established at the Golden Cross, Charing Cross. The Cross family, towards the end of the eighteenth century, claimed to rank with the county families of Hampshire, and John Cross was himself a man of wealth. He had inherited some, and had made more by fetching and carrying for the Government along the old Portsmouth Road in the romantic days of our long wars with France. He not only had his establishment in London and a town house in Portsmouth, but also the three separate and distinct country seats of Freeland House and Stodham, near Petersfield, and the house and grounds of Qualletes, at Horndean, purchased in after years by Admiral Sir Charles Napier, and renamed by him "Merchistoun." John Cross was always headstrong and reckless, and made much money--and lost much. The story of how he would fill his pockets with gold at his bank at Portsmouth and then ride the lonely twenty miles thence to Horndean explains his making and his losing. No cautious traveller in those times went alone by that road, and the highwaymen tried often to bag this particularly well-known man, who carried such wealth on him. "Many a shot I've had at old John Cross of Stodham," said one of these gentry when lying, cast for execution, in Portsmouth Gaol; adding regretfully, "but I couldn't hit him: he rode like the devil." [Illustration: "KNEE-DEEP": THE "LYNN AND WELLS MAIL" IN A SNOWSTORM. [_From a Print after C. Cooper Henderson._]]