The fame of the affair was great and lasting. That coaching specialist, James Pollard, drew, and R. Havell engraved, a plate showing the dramatic scene, which was dedicated to Thomas Hasker, Superintendent of His Majesty’s Mails. In it you see Joseph Pike, the guard, rising to shoot the very heraldic-looking lioness, and the passengers encouraging him in the background, from the safe retreat of the first-floor windows. It will be observed that this is apparently the lioness’s first spring, and yet those passengers are already upstairs: at once a striking testimony to their agility and a warranty of the exquisite truth of the saying that fear lends wings to the feet. XXV Salisbury spire and the distant city come with the welcome surprise of a Promised Land after these bleak downs. Even three miles away the unenclosed wilds are done, and we drop continuously from Three Mile Hill, down, down, down to the lowlands on a smooth and uninterrupted road, to where the trees and the houses can be distinguished, nestling around and below the graceful cathedral, a long way yet ahead. It is coming thus with that needle-pointed spire, so long and so prominently in view, that the story of its having been built to its extraordinary height of 404 feet for the purpose of guiding the strayed footsteps of travellers across the solitudes of Salisbury Plain may readily be believed. Salisbury wears a bland and cheerful appearance, and has an air of modernity that quite belies its age. Few places in England have so well-ascertained an origin. We can fix the very year, six hundred and eighty years ago, when it began to be, and yet, although there is the cathedral to prove its age, with the Poultry Cross, and very many ancient houses happily still standing, it has a general air of anything but mediævalism. This curious feeling that strikes every visitor is really owing to the generous and well-ordered plan on which the city was originally laid out; broad streets being planned in geometrical precision, and the blocks of houses built in regular squares. That phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, thought Salisbury ‘a very desperate sort of place; an exceedingly wild and dissipated city’--a view of it which is not shared by any one else. I wish I could tell you to which inn it was that he resorted to have dinner, and to await the arrival of Martin. A coaching inn, of course, for Martin came by coach from London. But whether it was the ‘White Hart,’ or the ‘Three Swans’ (which, alas! is no longer an inn), or the ‘King’s Arms,’ or the ‘George,’ is more than I or any one else can determine. [Sidenote: _NEW SARUM_]