Market Street Lane, to the “Bridgewater Arms” in 1788. He was succeeded by H. C. Lacy, who in 1827 removed to what had until then been a private mansion at the corner of Market Street and Mosley Street, and opened it as the “Royal Hotel and New Bridgewater Arms.” The older inn has long since been converted into warehouses, occupied at the present time by Messrs. Woodhouse, Hambly & Co. [Sidenote: _THE DAY COACHES_] Among the few stage-coaches advertised to run through the whole distance from London to Manchester and Glasgow was the “Courier,” which was started in later years and ran until the opening of the railway. It set out from the “Belle Sauvage,” Ludgate Hill, and from the “Castle and Falcon,” Aldersgate Street, every weekday at 3 p.m., and connected by a branch coach at Carlisle with Edinburgh. V Strange portents were seen upon the road to Manchester in the early years of last century. About 1824 began the era of the fast day coaches, and fine vehicles, handsome horses, and decent harness were provided for the travelling public, instead of the springless tubs, wretched cattle, and harness composed chiefly of odd pieces of worn leather eked out with string, which made up the uncomfortable old night coaches. It was a new era in more than one sense, for this was that now historic period when horseless vehicles were first put upon the public roads. The ’twenties of the nineteenth century were almost as remarkable for those early horseless vehicles, the steam carriages, as the present era is for petrol-driven and electric motor-cars. Railways, too, began early to threaten stage-and mail-coaching; and long, whirling, and involved controversies on road and rail traffic occupied the columns of the press, and overflowed into innumerable pamphlets. Few people had sufficient imagination to foresee an era of mechanical locomotion; but one pamphleteer, who unfortunately elected to remain anonymous, published in 1824 what modern journalists with an insufficient English vocabulary would doubtless call a _brochure_ on the subject. This booklet, entitled _The Fingerpost_, is, according to its title page, “By???.” Whoever he may have been who thus veiled his identity behind those triple notes of interrogation, he certainly was a seer. He foresaw our own times with limpid vision—and smelt them, too. He thought it “reasonable to conclude that the nervous man will ere long take his place in a carriage drawn or impelled by a Locomotive Engine with more unconcern and with far better assurance of safety than he now disposes of himself in one drawn by four horses of unequal powers and speed, endued with passions that acknowledge no control but superior force, and each separately, momentarily, liable to all the calamities that flesh is heir to. Surely an inanimate power, that can be started, stopped, and guided at pleasure by the finger or foot of man, must promise greater personal security to the traveller than a power derivable from animal life.”