Bonnor--we blush to record it--received as the reward of his infamy the place of comptroller of the inland department. His promotion brought him little pleasure. The Post Office servants, with all their faults, were loyal to the backbone, and they could ill understand being presided over by one who was branded with the foulest of all private vices, with treachery to a friend and ingratitude to a benefactor. His subordinates would hold no communication with him beyond what their strict duty required. His equals shunned him. Outside the Post Office, go where he would, he received the cold shoulder. Never was man left more severely alone. At the end of two years fresh postmasters-general came who, under the plea of abolishing his appointment, dismissed him with a small pension. Then he became insolvent, and was thrown into prison. Released from confinement at the end of the century, he published pamphlet after pamphlet, having for their object to vindicate what he was pleased to call his good name; but these vindications, though replete with professions of honour, proved nothing more than that the writer was a poltroon as well as a traitor. CHAPTER XIII THE NINETIES: OR, ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO The spirit of activity which Palmer had infused into the Post Office did not cease with the cessation of his official career. Those who served under him had been selected by himself; and they had been selected on account of qualities which the withdrawal of his dominating influence was calculated rather to stimulate than to check. These men now came to the fore, and not only ably sustained their late master's work but inaugurated important measures of their own. But before proceeding to chronicle the acts of Palmer's successors, we propose to give a few particulars which will serve better perhaps than a mere record of leading events to shew the state of the Post Office at the time that Palmer left it; and in this relation the project with which his name is mainly identified shall have precedence. In 1792 sixteen mail-coaches left London every day, and as many returned. These were in addition to the cross country mail-coaches, of which there were fifteen--as, for instance, the coach between Bristol and Oxford or, as it was commonly called, Mr. Pickwick's coach.[70] Those leaving London started from the General Post Office in Lombard Street at eight o'clock in the evening, and they travelled every day, Sundays included. [70] Later on, Mr. Pickwick would seem to have extended his operations. "(Q.) Are you in the habit of working coaches to any great distance from London? (A.) I work them half-way to Bristol. With Mr. Pickwick of Bath I work to Newbury."--Evidence of Mr. William Home, taken on the 2nd of March 1819 before the Select Committee on the Highways of the Kingdom.