At any rate such as he could afford to take his ease and partake of the best. Those who needed pity were the poor folk who had just enough for the journey, and could not afford to stay at expensive inns, waiting until better weather came. But, however much we may read in novels of the charm of winter travelling in the old coaching days, if we turn to contemporary accounts, by the travellers themselves, we shall always find that even those who could afford the best did not like it. Henry St. George Tucker, afterwards Chairman of the East India Company, travelled from Edinburgh to London in 1816, in the depth of winter. He wrote:— “Throughout the whole journey, as far as Newcastle, we had a violent storm of snow, rain and sleet; and the cold was more severe than I had felt it before. The coach was not wind-tight at the bottom; and as I was obliged to keep my window open to allow the escape of certain fumes, the produce of whisky, rum, and brandy, I felt the cold so pinching that I should have been glad of fur cap and worsted stockings. To aggravate the evil, I had not a decent companion to converse with. We picked up sundry vagabonds on the road, but there was only one, between Edinburgh and York, who bore the ‘slightest appearance of being a gentleman.’” He, however, we learn was “effeminate and affected.” In Mozley’s _Reminiscences_ we find a horrid story of the endurance practised by a woman travelling by coach from Edinburgh to London. “I once travelled,” he says, “to London _vis-à-vis_ with a thin, pale, elderly woman, ill-clad in black, who never once got down, or even moved to shake off the snow that settled on her lap and shoulders. I spoke to the guard about her. He said she had come from Edinburgh and had not moved since changing coaches, which she would have to do once; she feared that if she once got down she would not he able to get up again. She had taken no food of any kind.” There the picture ends, and this tragical figure is lost. Who was she who endured so much? Had she come to London to purchase with her few savings the discharge of an only son who had enlisted in the army? Had she made this awful journey to bid good-bye to a husband condemned to death or transportation? Surely some such story was hers, but we can never know it, and so the gaunt figure, pathetic in its endurance, haunts the memory and the baffled curiosity like an enigma.