It was in 1756 that Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness travelled to London from Edinburgh in her own post-chaise, her sturdy serving-man, John Rattray, riding beside the vehicle on horseback, armed with pistols and a broadsword by his side. She set out from Edinburgh on the 3rd of June and reached London on the evening of the 10th—an astonishing rapid journey, it was thought. Let it not be supposed that the armed serving-man, or the case of pistols the good dame carried with her inside the vehicle, showed an excess of precaution. Not at all; as was instanced near that suspicious place, Bawtry, in whose neighbourhood a doubtful character whom they took to be a highwayman made his appearance. However, when John Rattray began talking ostentatiously about powder and ball to the post-boy, the supposed malefactor was nonplussed; and on John Rattray furthermore “showing his whanger,” the fellow made off. And so Cox—and Box—were satisfied. Strangest of all travellers, however, was Peter Woulfe, chemist, mineralogist, and eccentric, whose specific for illness was a journey by mail-coach. He indulged this whim for years, riding from London to Edinburgh and back, until 1803, when the remedy proved worse than the disease, for he caught cold on these bleak miles and died. John Scott, afterwards Earl of Eldon and created Lord Chancellor, left a record of his early travels along this road—surely it were better named the Road to Fortune! He left school at Newcastle in 1766 to proceed to London on the way to Oxford, and travelled in a “fly,” so called because it did the journey in the previously unheard-of time of three days and four nights. This “fly” had probably once been a private carriage, for it still bore the motto, “_Sat cito_, _si sat bene_”—that is to say, “Quick enough, if well enough”—exquisitely appropriate, however, to that slow pace. Young Scott had noticed this, and made an impudent remark to a fellow-traveller, a Quaker, who, when they halted at Tuxford, had given sixpence to a chamber-maid, telling her that he had forgotten to give it her when he had slept at the inn two years before. “Friend,” said he to the Quaker, “have you seen the motto on this coach?” “No,” said his companion. “Then look at it,” he rejoined, “for I think giving her sixpence now is neither sat cito nor sat bene.”