Between this point and Candleriggs were found the principal coach offices. From Walker’s coach-office at the “Tontine,” the mail-coach for London started at about 1 a.m., called at the Post Office in Glassford Street for the bags, left there at 1.15, pulled up again at the “Tontine” for the way-bill, and then was off in earnest, its five lamps glaring through the darkness. Its first considerable pull-up was at Beattock Inn, where breakfast before a blazing fire, off Finnan haddock, chops, ham and eggs, baps and buttered toast made amends to the passengers for much. Such, until the beginning of 1848, were the initial circumstances of the long journey to London. The coaching inns of Glasgow were distributed in the Gallowgate, the Cross, and Argyle Street. Chief among these was the “Saracen’s Head,” a large building, for its era, with a frontage of one hundred feet to Gallowgate. Greatly admired at the time of its being built, in 1754, it was, according to modern ideas, a singularly grim and hard-featured frontage of stone that greeted travellers who halted here, at what was then by far the foremost hostelry in the city of Glasgow. [Sidenote: _THE “SARACEN’S HEAD”_] It stood hard by where the East Port in the Gallowgate marked the ancient limits of the city in that direction, and owed its origin to the expansion of Glasgow following upon the more settled times that ensued after the suppression of “the Forty-five.” The Glasgow magistrates caused the old Gallowgate Port to be removed in 1749, and, in their zeal for extending the city, spared nothing; demolishing the neighbouring fourteenth-century Archbishop’s Palace, and desecrating the chapel and kirkyard of St. Mungo without the walls. In 1754 they advertised their readiness to sell the old kirkyard for feuing, and offered especial inducements to any speculative person who would undertake the establishment of an hotel, then felt to be greatly needed in Glasgow; where, up to that period, only inns of a doubtful character, and of an insanitary condition that admitted of no doubts whatever, existed. The speculator was duly forthcoming, in the person of Robert Tennent, landlord at the time of the “White Hart” inn, in the Gallowgate, who on November 24th, 1754, purchased the land of the kirkyard, on the understanding that he built an hotel according to plans to be agreed upon. As an extra inducement, the vendors threw into the bargain the stones of the demolished Archbishop’s Palace, and from them the “Saracen’s Head” was accordingly built.