One of the last relics of old times went, unhonoured, in 1872, when the turnpike-gates on either side of Coventry were abolished; and a long-enduring link was broken when Thomas Clarke died, in Coventry Hospital, April, 1899. Clarke was, according to the newspapers chronicling the event, the “oldest postboy in England.” Not a few, also, proclaimed him to be “the last”; but last postboys have been dying in considerable numbers since then, and modest paragraphs in the daily papers still appear, now and again, recording the passing of another. The Last Postboy, indeed, is not yet, and those paragraphs are not uncommonly followed by letters from survivors, who are always found to write and claim the honour for themselves. They are as inexhaustible as the widow’s cruise of oil, pieces of the True Cross, or relics of the saints in Roman Catholic churches. When the traveller of experience has seen the skull of St. Jerome in one place, he is not surprised „to be shown another somewhere else, for he has already seen five thigh bones of some other saint at different shrines, and knows that, if he perseveres, he will probably find some more. Just in the same way, there is always another postboy when the last has died. They were—or are, we must perhaps say—a long-lived race, all bone and gristle; without a spare ounce of flesh for disease to fasten upon, and, inured for long years to hard work in all weathers, little affected in old age by the chills and bitter winds that carry off the less hardy among elderly folks. The coachman was of another kind. He sat on his box all the time, and grew fat in fingering the ribbons; while the postboy bumped his flesh away on horseback. Did any one ever see a fat postboy? And was it not the exception for a coachman to be lean? His fatness long since carried off the last coachman of the old days, but the Three jolly postboys, drinking at the Dragon, who, in the words of the old chorus, “determined to finish off the flagon,” are probably still living, in a hale and lean old age, although coaches, and chaises, and all the old life of the road have gone, and the “Dragon” itself no longer looks down the dusty highway. [Illustration: THE OLD “KING’S HEAD,” COVENTRY. _From a Print after Rowlandson._]