There is a “Saracen’s Head” on Snow Hill to this day, but it is a modern building. From the old house went the “Lord Nelson,” York, Newcastle, and Edinburgh coach; the “Post,” despite its name, a slow-coach, for Carlisle and Penrith, by Doncaster, Ferrybridge, and Greta Bridge, doubtless the one by which Mr. Wackford Squeers took his “dear pupils” to Dotheboys Hall; and coaches to Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury, besides others for the western roads. The “Saracen’s Head” was kept by Mrs. Mountain, in succession to her husband and her husband’s father. Her son, Peter, managed the business for her, but it must not be supposed that she took no active part in it. To the contrary, Mrs. Sarah Ann Mountain, like her contemporary, Mrs. Nelson, of the “Bull,” Aldgate, possessed the most brilliant business capacity. She built coaches, as well as horsing them, and earned a profit by charging her partners down the road the mileage which in the usual course of business would have been paid over to a coach-builder. There was no more expressive sight in the London of the beginning of the nineteenth century than the simultaneous starting of the mails every evening from the General Post Office. Londoners and country-cousins alike were never weary of the spectacle of the smart coaches, the business-like coachmen, and the resplendent, scarlet-coated guards preparing to travel through the night, north, south, east, or west, with his Majesty’s mails. Even the passengers shone with a reflected glory, and felt important as, one after the other, the twenty-seven mails began at the stroke of eight o’clock to move off from the double file that lined the street. [Picture: The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill] That street was not the broad thoroughfare of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, but the narrow one of Lombard Street, in which the General Post Office was situated for many years, until 1829, when what is now called the “old” General Post Office, but was then the newly completed building of Smirke’s, was occupied. The old headquarters can still be seen, in the Lombard Street Post Office of to-day. It is from here that the picture of the mails starting, forming the frontispiece of this volume, was taken. To our eyes, accustomed to the crowded thoroughfare of modern times, the street appears supremely dull and desolate, but that is only a retrospective way of looking at it.