The ‘White Bear,’ Piccadilly, he adds, was looked upon with contempt, as being the place whence only the slow coaches started. The mails and stages moved off to the accompaniment of news-vendors pushing the sale of the expensive and heavily taxed newspapers of the period, and the cries of the Jew-boys who sold oranges and cedar pencils on the pavement at sixpence a dozen. Once clear of town, his enthusiasm over the travel of other days finds scope, and he begins: ‘What an infinite succession of teams! What an endless vista of ever-changing miles of country! What a delicious sense of belonging to some select and specially important and adventurous section of humanity as we clattered through the streets of quiet little country towns at midnight, or even at three or four o’clock in the morning; ourselves the only souls awake in all the place. What speculations as to the immediate bestowal and occupation of the coachman as he “left you here, sir,” in the small hours!’ Then he goes on to give a kind of gossipy history of the smart mails put on the road about 1820. ‘A new and accelerated mail-coach service was started under the title of the “Devonport Mail,” at that time the fastest in England. Its performances caused a sensation in the coaching world, and it was known in such circles as the “Quicksilver Mail.” Its early days had chanced, unfortunately, to be marked by two or three accidents, which naturally gave it an increased celebrity. ‘And if it is considered what those men and horses were required to perform, the wonder was, not that the “Quicksilver” should have come to grief two or three times, but rather that it ever made its journey without doing so. What does the railway traveller of the present day, who sees a travelling Post Office and its huge tender, crammed with postal matter, think of the idea of carrying all that mass on one, or perhaps two, coaches? The guard, occupying his solitary post behind the coach on the top of the receptacle called, with reference to the constructions of still earlier days, the _hinder_-boot, sat on a little seat made for one, with his pistol and blunderbuss in a box in front of him. And the original notion of those who first planned the modern mail coach was that the bags containing the letters should be carried in the _hinder_-boot. The fore-boot, beneath the driver’s box, was considered to be appropriated to the baggage of the three outside and four inside passengers, which was the _Mail’s_ entire complement. One of the outsiders shared the box with the driver, and two occupied the seat on the roof behind him, their backs to the horses, and facing the guard, who had a seat all to himself. The accommodation provided for these two was not of a very comfortable description. They were not, indeed, crowded, as the four who occupied a similar position on another coach often were; but they had a mere board to sit on, whereas the seats on the roof of an ordinary stage coach were provided with cushions. The