Of these feats, that of Sir Robert Cary, son of Lord Hunsdon, is not the least remarkable. He carried the news of Queen Elizabeth’s death to James at Edinburgh, and was the first to hail him King of England. Riding in furious haste, and with fresh horses wherever he could obtain them, he succeeded in covering the distance in the sixty hours between a Thursday morning and a Saturday night. Again, a very few years later—in May 1606—a certain esquire of James the First’s, John Lepton of York, undertook for a wager to ride on six consecutive days between that city and London. He started from Aldersgate on the 20th of May, and accomplished his task every day before darkness had fallen; “to the greater praise of his strength in acting than to his discretion in undertaking it,” as Fuller remarks. He also, of course, had relays of horses. Among the pedestrians is Ben Jonson, who walked to Scotland, on his visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, starting in June 1618; but he footed it less for sport than from necessity. When Charles the First was at York, according to Clarendon, it was a frequent occurrence for gentlemen couriers to ride with despatches between that place and London, completing the double journey—400 miles—in thirty-four hours. Thus, a letter sent by the Council in London on the Saturday, midnight, was answered on its arrival at York by the king, and the answer delivered in London at ten o’clock on the Monday morning. Then there was Cooper Thornhill, landlord of the “Bell” at Stilton, who for a wager rode to London and back again to Stilton, about 1740. The distance, 154 miles in all, was done in eleven hours thirty-three minutes and forty-six seconds. He had nineteen horses to carry him, and so is no rival of Turpin’s mythical exploit in riding to York on his equally mythical Black Bess; but he was evidently considered a wonderful person, for there was a poem published about him in 1745, entitled “The Stilton Hero: O Tempora! O Mores:” a sixpenny quarto of fourteen pages.