One shudders to think what would become of railway directors and shareholders if the old Law of Deodand were still in existence. It was an ancient enactment, going back to the days of the Saxon kings, by which the object causing the death of a person was forfeited for the benefit of his representatives. At least, that was originally the humane intention of the law, which then really represented the etymology of its name, making it a God-given compensation. Sometimes the death-dealing object was valuable; occasionally it was practically valueless; just as might happen. But, like many another originally just and equitable thing, the Law of Deodand became perverted, and the inevitable Landowner found his account in it. It is difficult to follow the reasoning that, when the person killed left no representatives, made the offending object forfeit to the Lord of the Manor on whose land the accident might happen; but so it came about. Deodand became limited after a time, and instead of those interested receiving the full value of the thing causing death, a jury would sit to assess the damages due according to circumstances. Thus, when the Holyhead Mail ran over and killed a boy on the road near South Mimms, the deodand on the coach and horses was assessed by the coroner’s jury at one sovereign. Rightly considered, however, deodand should not in this case have been levied at all, for the accident was entirely due to a group of three boys, of whom the deceased was one, darting across the road under the horses’ heads to see how nearly they could come to the coach without being run over: a common feat with boys in those days, and one that ruined many a coachman’s nerves. In this case the boy was killed, and clearly by his own fault. Had the deodand not been limited, a curious legal point might have arisen, as it had done before, in the case of a man being killed by a horse and loaded waggon running over him; when, the value of the horse and waggon being claimed, the lawyers successfully raised the point that it was not the horse that killed the man but the waggon. In the result, the deodand was lessened by the value of the horse. This law was finally abolished before railways came into existence, or we might have seen locomotives and whole trains forfeited to relatives of the accidentally killed; or, failing these, to the Lord of the Manor in the particular spot where the accident happened. A perhaps less sporting practice than that of permitting amateurs to handle the ribbons, but one certainly also less dangerous to the travelling public, was the wholly unauthorised and altogether illegitimate custom that began to obtain in later years of admitting a third person upon the box of the mails.