But what we are particularly concerned to tell at this moment is the story of the strange coincidence by which the Waterloo carriage was secured for the Exhibition. In all the wonderful happenings associated with this place, possibly none is quite so simple and yet so surprising as this. Mr. Joseph Tussaud, the elder son of Madame Tussaud, was a great lover of London, and it was his delight to roam leisurely about the Metropolis, studying the streets and byways and the people who traversed them. In one of these peregrinations during the spring of 1842 he found himself leaning over the parapet of London Bridge, watching the movements of the diversified craft on the river, when he observed by the wharves of Billingsgate a carriage being hoisted ashore from the deck of a ship like a huge spider hanging from its web. That in itself was probably a fairly frequent occurrence, and it would have passed from Mr. Tussaud’s memory except for what followed. There were numbers of people looking over the bridge--as may be seen to-day, and will be seen for many a day to come--and my great-uncle suddenly heard the voice of a countryman next to him saying, “That’s a very fine carriage, but I know where there’s a finer that some people would give a lot to have. I could take you to a place where you could see the selfsame carriage in which Napoleon tried to escape from Waterloo.” This was news indeed to a Tussaud--the one man in all London to whom it mattered most--and it may be imagined that the countryman was encouraged to go on with his story and show the way to the coveted relic. The carriage, which has since been of inestimable value to Madame Tussaud’s, was traced to a repository in Gray’s Inn Road, belonging to one Robert Jeffreys, “a respectable coach manufacturer, who took the carriage in part payment of a bad debt,” as explained in a contemporary news-sheet. Did ever time play a trick like that with the carriage of an Emperor? “In part payment of a bad debt!” Who the debtor was, there is no telling now; it is, however, known that the carriage had been bought at a Tattersall auction, when short-sighted speculators let Napoleon’s chariot go cheap. Previously the carriage had earned a fortune for Mr. William Bullock, who took it round the country as an exhibit, which the people flocked in their thousands to see, till the novelty wore off and the carriage was rolled into the repository of Jeffreys, the coach-builder, where it remained for years with none to do it reverence. An early cartoon by Cruikshank, in November of the Waterloo year, portrays a clamorous crowd surrounding the carriage when on view at the Egyptian Hall, and, it must be admitted, treating it with scant respect.