And so the Portsmouth Road was kept open in that wild winter, while most of the main roads in England were hopelessly snowed up. But memories of coaching days on this old road are rather meagre, for, although sea-faring business sent a great many travellers journeying between London and the dockyard town, the Portsmouth Road was never celebrated for crack coaches or for record times, and when coaching was in full swing, men saw as little romance in being dragged down the highways behind four horses as we can discover in railway travelling. With coach-proprietors, the horsing and equipping of a coach were matters of business, and beyond looking shrewdly after that business, the most of them cared little enough for coaching history. With the passengers, too, travelling was an evil to be endured. It irked them intolerably: it was a necessity, a duty,--what you will for unpleasantness,--and so, when the journey was done, the better part of them immediately dismissed it from their minds, instead of dwelling fondly upon the memories of perils overcome and rigours endured--as we are apt to imagine. [Sidenote: _REGRETS FOR COACHING DAYS_] It was only when the Augustan age of coaching had dawned that travellers began to feel any delight or exhilaration in road-travel; and that age was cut short so untimely by the Railway Era that the young fellows and the middle-aged men whose blood coursed briskly through their veins, and who knew a thing or two about horse-flesh, felt a not unnatural regret in the change, and conceived an altogether natural affection for the old _régime_. Their regret can be the more readily understood when one inquires into the beginnings of railway travel; when conveyance by steam _might_ have been more expeditious than the coach service (although what with delays and unpunctuality at the inauguration of railways even _that_ was an open question), but certainly was at the same time much more uncomfortable. For, in place of the sheltered inside of a coach, or the frankly open and unprotected outside, the primitive railway passenger was conveyed to his destination in an open truck exposed to the furious rush of air caused by the passage of the train; and, all the way, he employed his time, not in admiring the landscape, or, as he was wont to do from a coach-top, in kissing his hand to the girls, but fleeted a penitential pilgrimage in scooping out from his eyes the blacks and coal-grit liberally imparted from the wobbly engine, own brother to the "Rocket," and immediate descendant of "Puffing Billy." No wonder they regretted the more healthful and cleanly journeys by coach, and small blame to them if they voted the railway a nuisance; believed the country to be "going to the dogs," and agreed with the Duke of Wellington, when he exclaimed, upon seeing the first railway train in progress, "There goes the English aristocracy!"