Unhappily—it is purely an antiquarian criticism—the prosperity and business energy of Norwich have swept away many landmarks of absorbing interest to the student of the roads, and much havoc has been wrought with the old coaching-inns. While many of the more obscure old taverns remain, the great coaching houses, standing on prominent sites and occupying much valuable ground, have, for the most part, been destroyed. Only “Rampant Horse Street” now remains to tell of the inn once bearing that name. The “Maid’s Head,” a splendid specimen of an old hostelry, remains, it is true, in Tombland, but where is the “King’s Head,” to which the Newmarket, Thetford, and Norwich Mail once came, and where the “Coach Office, Lobster Lane,” whence the Cromer Coach, the “Unicorn,” by North Walsham, set out twice a day? What the “Unicorn” was like we may see from Pollard’s picture. It was something between an omnibus and a hearse, and was drawn by a “unicorn” team—_i.e._, three horses; whence the name of the coach. [Illustration: THE “UNICORN,” NORWICH AND CROMER COACH. _From a print after J. Pollard, 1830._] St. Peter’s, the narrow thoroughfare adjoining Rampant Horse Street, behind the loop road, and overshadowed by the great bulk of St. Peter Mancroft, was a great rendezvous for the coaching and carrying interests, and signs of that old-time feature in its history still remain in the numerous inns and houses that once were inns, now converted to other uses. Of these the most important by far was the “White Swan,” sometimes called, for convenience, merely the “Swan.” Many years have passed since it retired from public life, and it is now occupied as a wholesale provision store, for which the spacious old coach-yard and its great ranges of buildings seem to render it peculiarly suitable. Many might pass the house unnoticed, for its red-brick front is severely plain. The old coach-archway, however, is sufficient to attract the attention of the observant, for although the fine late seventeenth-century decorative carvings of festooned fruit and flowers on its framing are blunted by time and many successive coats of paint, their excellence still proclaims itself to the critical eye. A cursory glance shows that the house was re-fronted with brick in the Georgian period, and that beneath that commonplace skin an ancient building, in parts dating back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, still exists. A little fragment peeps interestingly from one corner of the red brick; it is an ancient corner-post, ornamented with the carving of an armed man. Not even those Georgian builders had the heart to destroy it. [Illustration: ST. PETER MANCROFT, AND YARD OF THE “WHITE SWAN.”]