The Norwich Mail, which took fifteen and a half hours to do the journey so late as 1821, was greatly improved in later years; and finally, in the early forties, when the railway reached Norwich and superseded the roads, performed the journey in eleven hours, thirty-eight minutes, at the very respectable average speed of 9½ miles an hour. It was not the only mail on the road, but shared the way so far as Ipswich with the Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail. This coach was unfortunate on two occasions between 1835 and 1839. On September 28th in the first year, when the coachman was climbing on to his box in the yard of the "Swan with Two Necks," the horses started away on their own accord, tumbling the coachman off and knocking down the helper who had been holding their heads. Dashing into Cheapside, they flung themselves against the back of the Poole Mail with such force that the coachman of that mail was also thrown off. He was taken unconscious to the hospital. Continuing their furious rush, the horses of the Ipswich Mail at length ran the pole of the coach between the iron railings of a house, and so were stopped. The second happening, in 1839, was somewhat similar. The mail had arrived at Colchester, and the coachman, throwing down the reins, got off the box. No one was at the horses' heads, and they started away and galloped down the High Street, until the near leader fell and broke his neck, stopping the team. It was by the Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail that David Copperfield journeyed down to Yarmouth on his second visit to Mr Peggotty. In the ordinary course of things, he would have reached Ipswich at 3·12 a.m. But on this occasion the weather was a potent factor in causing delay. He occupied the box seat, and remarked upon the look of the sky to the coachman while yet on the first stage out of London. "Don't you think that a very remarkable sky?" he asked; "I don't remember to have seen one like it." "Nor I--not equal to it," said the coachman. "That's mist, sir. There'll be mischief done at sea, I expect, before long." The description of this stormy sky is very fine, and seems to have been drawn from observation; just as true and as effective in its way as Old Crome's billowy cloudscapes, in his _Mousehold Heath_, or as any of Constable's rain-surcharged Suffolk scenes. "It was a murky confusion--here and there blotted with a colour like the colour of the smoke from damp fuel--of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much increased, and the sky was more overcast, and it blew hard.