THE HOLYHEAD ROAD 367 



cfet outside now ! I aren't used to this. Well ! This is 

 travelling like a gentleman, and inside the Mail to be 

 sure ! Well ! I never travelled inside a Mail or a coach 

 before ; and I dare say I never shall again ! I don't 

 think I like the inside of a coach much ; and so I'd 

 better eet out now! it feels wonderful odd somehow to 

 be inside the Mail ; and I really hardly know how I got 

 there." 



On the same coach, but further up the road, Dan 

 Herbert did his twenty-four miles between Ecclcshall and 

 Lichfield with two changes, and his twenty-four miles back 

 the same day, — an artist perfected in the quiet method, 

 driving bad teams punctually without punishing them, 

 rather by the medium of fine hands and temper coaxing 

 them along. He was upwards of thirty years on the 

 Chester and Holyhead Mail, and in consideration of 

 his faithful and correct attention to business was 

 awarded a scarlet coat on every anniversary of the 

 King's birthday. 



And George Clarke was an artist of the same calibre 

 and of like style. He took the Umpire at Newport 

 Pagnell (fifty-one miles from London), and met the down 

 coach at Whetstone returning about nine o'clock. The 

 most valuable of servants, because the first coachman in 

 England for bad horses. Having always weak horses to 

 nurse, the ordeal had worn him down to a pattern of 

 patience. With these and other great weights upon 

 severe ground, he was steady, easy and economical in 

 thong and cord, very light-handed, and sometimes even 

 playful ! 



An idyllic description of a great coachman's kind 

 qualities this, raising all sorts of pictures to the mind's 

 eye of comfortable journeys performed under a master's 

 direction with no discomfort to the cattle ; but we enter 

 into a wilder, a fiercer atmosphere of travel, when we 

 come to consider the great names of John Marchant of 

 the Manchester Telegraph, and Bob Snow of the Defiance. 

 For these men drove opposition coaches, in which speed 



