THE HOLYHEAD ROAD 361 



outing, in a foolishcr moment, if there be such a word, 

 he got on a railway which was only half finished. He 

 got on to this railway at Wrexham, intending to go as 

 far as Chester. This feat the unfinished railway accom- 

 plished for him, only however to throw him off a bridge 

 (unfinished too, I suppose) when he got there. Well 

 may his biographer exclaim, " Poor Jack ! He would 

 have been safer driving the Nettle Coach, in all proba- 

 bility ! " (which "in all probability" gives us a very fair 

 idea of the safety of the Nettle Coach ! But this is a 

 digression.) And Jack was as pretty a coachman as 

 ever had four horses in hand. " A good workman in all 

 respects, smart as a new pin." 



Another celebrated coachman on this road met as sad, 

 but more consistent a fate, this was Dick Vickers, who 

 drove the Mail between Shrewsbury and Holyhead. He 

 fell a victim to agriculture. That is to say that though 

 in stature he was so little " that he had to get on to six- 

 pennyworth of coppers to look on to the top of a Stilton 

 cheese " yet the deluded man pined to be a farmer. 

 And he was fond of fishing too, a much more profitable 

 pastime. However a farmer Vickers became, in spite of 

 his friends' entreaties, who after a reasonable interval of 

 anxiety found him sus. per coll. This Vickers, not 

 content with the lack of judgment he displayed while on 

 earth, is said to haunt the scene of his indiscretion still. 

 Though the Mail which he used to drive has long ceased 

 to exist, they do say that at times a rumbling is heard — 

 and so on. Mr. Birch Reynardson, to get to something 

 more tangible about Vickers, knew him well, as he seems 

 to have known most of the crack coachmen on the 

 Holyhead Road, through Shrewsbury, and has described 

 them as well as he knew them in his Down the Road. 

 The ill-fated Vickers, he writes, was a good little 

 fellow, always civil, always sober, always most obliging, 

 and a friend of every one along the road. And Mr. 

 Reynardson had some opportunity of studying his 

 model's characteristics, particularly I should conceive on 



