Horrified horse-owners, and old-fashioned persons with prejudices against invention and progress, raise outcries against the pace of motor-cars, and have succeeded in reducing the legal speed on roads from the original 14 miles an hour allowed by Act of Parliament to the 12 miles permitted by an order of the Local Government Board; but the pace attained toward the close of the coaching era by some of the crack coaches was much higher. The rival “Tally-Ho” and “Independent Tally-Ho” coaches, for instance, ran certain stages up to 18¾ miles an hour, and only on one stage did they drop down to 12 miles. “Furious driving,” indeed, and vouched for by the contemporary _Coventry Chronicle_, May 8th, 1830, which well heads its report, “Extraordinary Travelling”:— “Saturday se’night, being May-day, the usual competition took place between the London Coaches. The “Independent Tally-ho,” running between Birmingham and London, performed a feat altogether unparalleled in the annals of Coaching, having travelled the distance of one-hundred-and-nine miles in seven hours and thirty-nine minutes. “The following is a correct account of the time it took to perform the distance, horsed by the various proprietors:—Mr. Horne, from London to Colney, seventeen-and-quarter miles, in one-hour-and-six minutes;—Mr. Bowman, from Colney to Redbourne (where the passengers, stopped six minutes for breakfast), seven-and-half miles, in twenty-six minutes;—Mr. Morris, from Redbourne to Hockliffe, twelve-and-quarter miles, in one-hour-and-four minutes;—Mr. Warden, from Hockliffe to Shenley, eleven miles, in forty-seven minutes;—Mr. May, from Shenley to Daventry, twenty-four miles, in one-hour-and-forty-nine minutes;—Mr. Garner, from Daventry to Coventry, nineteen-and-quarter miles, in one-hour-and-twelve minutes;—Mr. Radenhurst, from Coventry to Birmingham, seventeen-and-three quarter miles, in one-hour-and-fifteen minutes. “The ‘Original Tally-ho’ performed the same distance in seven-hours-and-fifty minutes.” The extraordinary feat of the “Independent-Tally-ho” recorded above, excelled the performances of that famous coach, the “Quicksilver” Exeter mail; but that is nothing compared with the passengers’ feat of swallowing a breakfast in the six minutes allowed for that meal at Redbourne. It is probably no great hazard to guess that those unhappy passengers had no breakfast at all on that historic occasion. It is not to be supposed that coaching was an altogether safe method of travelling, especially when feats of this kind were indulged in; but it must be acknowledged that comparatively few of the accidents happened when racing. Among the disasters that now and again occurred, besides those recorded elsewhere in these pages, the following specimens, from October 1834 to the close of 1837, are typical:—