This fine reckless character lived to dissipate everything in ill-judged speculations, and misfortunes of all kinds visited the family. We are told but little of them in the pages of his son's book, but it was entirely owing to one of these visitations that Thomas Cross found his whole career changed. Destined by his father for the Navy, he was entered as a midshipman, but he had been subject from his birth to fits, and coming home on one occasion and going into the cellars of a wine business his father had in the meanwhile taken, he was seized by one of these attacks, and falling on a number of wine-bottles, was so seriously injured that the profession of the Navy had to be abandoned. We afterwards find him as a farmer in Hampshire, and then, involved in the financial disasters that overtook the family, reduced to seeking an engagement as coachman in the very yard his father had once owned. It is curious that, either intentionally or by accident, he does not mention the name of the coach he drove between London and Lynn, but calls it always "the Lynn coach." There were changes on the road between 1821, when he first drove along it, and 1847, when he was driven off, but he is chiefly to be remembered as the driver of the "Lynn Union." He tells how he came to the box-seat, how miserably he was shuttlecocked from one to the other when in search of employment, and how, when the whip who drove the "Lynn coach" on its stage between Cambridge and London had taken an inn and was about to relinquish his seat, he could obtain no certain information that the post would be vacant. The bookkeeper of the coach-office said it would; the coachman himself told a lie and said he was not going to give up the job. In this condition of affairs Cross did not know what to do, until a kindly acquaintance gave him the date upon which the lying Jehu must take possession of his inn and of necessity give up coaching, and advised him to journey down to Cambridge, meet the up coach there as it drove into the Bull yard, and present himself as the coachman come to take it up to London. Cross scrupulously carried out this suggestion, and when he made his appearance, with whip and in approved coaching costume, at the Bull, and was asked who he was and what he wanted, replied as his friend had indicated. No one offered any objection, and no other coachman had appeared by the time he drove away, punctual to the very second we may be quite sure. An old resident of Lynn, who has written his recollections of bygone times in that town, tells us that Thomas Cross "was not much of a whip," a criticism that seems to be doubly underscored in Cross's own description of this first journey to London, when he drove straight into the double turnpike gates that then stretched across the Kingsland Road, giving everyone a good shaking, and cause, in many bruises, to remember his maiden effort.