The onerous burden of the tolls payable by stage-coaches can scarcely be realised, save by stating a specific example. The amount incurred on a single journey to Manchester was no less than £5 13_s._ 5_d._, and this was by no means exceptional. Of course, the coach did not stop to pay toll at every gate, the practice being to settle monthly. The burden seems a heavy one for coach proprietors, but was, like every other tax, levied in the end upon the consumer, being finally paid by the coach passengers in their fares, calculated on the basis of the coach proprietors’ expenses. At last, in 1837, with the opening of the London and Birmingham Railway to Manchester, this petty warfare was stilled, and the business of the coach proprietors seemed to be ended. In 1836, when the railway had been opened as far as Birmingham, Chaplin and Benjamin Worthy Horne, two of the largest proprietors, had been induced to withdraw from the road, and to throw their interest on the side of the new methods; but Sherman refused to hear anything of the kind. He was the most courageous, not to say the most obstinate, of men; thoroughly British in the characteristics of doggedness and unwillingness to own himself beaten. He did not believe in railways, until the stern fact of his coaches running empty along the road convinced him, at a considerable loss; and when in 1837 temporary trouble arose between the public and the railway, and some were already regretting the old days, he dashed in and re-established his “Red Rover” coach, which lasted a year or more, losing money heavily when the Manchester people and the railway had composed their quarrel. [Sidenote: _EDWARD SHERMAN_] The character-sketch of Sherman, here begun, may here be fitly concluded. Without doubt a man of strong character, he had many peculiarities, among them a decided taste for extravagance in dress and jewellery, remarkable even at that time, when dress was very exuberant indeed. Instead of sporting a shirt front, his chest displayed an expanse of black satin, plentifully covered with diamond pins. One day a thief came behind him in the street, reached a hand over his shoulder, and made off with a valuable specimen. Sherman afterwards had them all attached to a chain. His fighting temper, if it stood him in good stead among his fellow coach proprietors, certainly, as we have seen, involved him in heavy losses in quarrelling with railways, before he found them too strong for him. To lose money was to him an especial grief. The very sight of sovereigns was a solace to him, and he kept a hundred in a tankard, deposited in his safe at the “Bull and Mouth,” so that he might always have the pleasure of handling the gold.