Coaching history at Coventry begins in 1658, with the establishment of a stage-coach between London, Lichfield, and Chester. This pioneer, starting from the “George” Inn, Holborn Bridge, reached Coventry in three days, or professed to do so. Suspicions that this was only a profession, not often put into practice, are aroused by the title of a new coach, put on the road in 1739. This was the “London, Birmingham, and Lichfield Flying Coach,” that took just the same time to reach Coventry, and yet arrogated the term “flying” to itself, as a superior recommendation above all earlier conveyances. The fare between London and Coventry was 25_s._ In 1773 a wonderful thing happened, for in that year the “Coventry Flying Machine” winged its way in one day. Later coaches belong to the road in general, and Coventry was but an incident on the way; but there were many short distances covered by local coaches, such as the “Peeping Tom” and the “Manchester Hero,” between this and Manchester, and numerous others to Birmingham, Lichfield, Warwick, Leamington, Cheltenham, and Stratford-on-Avon. A “Little Wonder” Coventry and Birmingham stage ran in the last years of coaching. Tom Pinner, its driver, was an expert with the whip, and could snatch the pipe out of a wayfarer’s mouth with it, and not touch him, as he drove along. One quite expects, in reading Tom Pinner’s career, to light upon the record of one of the victims of these little pleasantries waiting for their author and pounding him into a jelly; but no one ever seems to have had sufficient spirit. Besides the “King’s Arms,” there were the “Queen’s Head,” the “Bull,” and the “White Bear” prominent among Coventry inns. The “Bull” stood where the Barracks are now situated, in Smithford Street. The “White Bear,” in High Street, changed its sign in 1811 to the “Craven Arms”; a name it still retains. The change was made out of compliment to the third Earl of Craven, who had then returned to live at Combe Abbey, a family seat near Coventry that had long been closed. His residence there brought much custom to the city and to the house. The old inn remains just as it was in coaching days. There are the long yard, with stables of Elizabethan date, and the solid red-brick portions of the house, rebuilt in the time when George III. was King, facing the narrow passage. Fronting on the street, the building is of old white-painted plaster. It was in front of the “Craven Arms” that the fatal accident, already recounted, to Tom Peck, the guard of the “Eclipse” coach, happened. Opposite was one of the many coach offices; the scene, perhaps, of that story of the little girl being booked overnight at half-price, as the custom was. Her elder sister took the seat in the morning, when the book-keeper remarked to her mother, “Your little girl has grown in the night.”