14 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



good an idea of the scale of an undertaking as anything 

 can. 



It has its lists of accidents too. It was not a eood 

 place even in the best days of the road to cross in a fog. 

 The celebrated Charles Ward was an eye-witness of a 

 calamity wjiich happened in 1840 when some thick 

 weather prevailed. He was bound for Bagshot and had 

 to be escorted out of London by torches, *' seven or 

 eight Mails following one after the other, the guard of 

 the foremost lighting the one following and soon till the 

 last." He took three hours to do the nine miles, and on 

 his way back to London, the same weather prevailing, 

 he found the old Exeter Mail in a ditch. The leaders 

 had come in contact with a haycart, which not un- 

 naturally caused them to turn suddenly round. They 

 foolishly did not stop here or all would have been well. 

 No ! They broke the pole, blundered down a steep 

 embankment, and brought up in the bottom of a deep 

 ditch filled with mud and water. The wheelers were 

 drowned and the Mail Coach pitched on the stump of a 

 willow tree that hung gracefully over the scene. Mean- 

 while where were the outside passengers ? They were 

 throw into the meadow beyond in company with the 

 coachman. The two inside passengers however re- 

 mained where they were, wherever that was, and were 

 extricated with some difficulty. Fortunately no one 

 was injured, which, considering the somewhat mixed 

 condition of men, beasts, and things, was fortunate, and 

 lends some colour to the fine distinction drawn between 

 railway and coaching accidents by a devotee of the 

 roads : — " You got upset in a coach or chaise," he cries, 

 " and there you were. You get upset in a railway, 

 and where are you ? " 



The same authority discourses more of fogs on 

 Hounslow Heath as follows :— 



" There were eight Mails," he writes (they ought to 

 be sung, these old coaching yarns, gray legends of a life 

 that has faded, and out of which much meaning has 



