300 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



fine men in their way by the Nemesis of a new invention. 

 It is a marvel to me when I read the record of their fall 

 that stage coachmen did not form themselves into an 

 amalgamated society, with branches everywhere, for 

 smaslKng locomotives. Never surely was such a fall 

 seen since the days of Lucifer, who is rather out of fashion, 

 as the fall of the great stage coachmen before the demon 

 steam. The observed of all observers at one moment ! 

 In another, heeded by no one ; buried away in obscure 

 corners of out-of-the-way counties ; driving buses ; 

 hanging about inn-yards, where formerly their very foot- 

 fall produced clumsy reverences from drunken post- 

 boys ; melancholy, blue-nosed phantoms of their former 

 selves. Seldom surely has there been so cruel a revo- 

 lution ! 



Why, this man Tom Hennesy, the dandy of the 

 Stamford Regent ! the knight of the crooked whip, the 

 adored of barmaids, the idol of schoolboys, horsil}^ in- 

 clined, for eighty-nine miles of the finest coaching road 

 in England, came down from mere natural force of 

 circumstances — circumstances in a real sense over which 

 he had no control — to what ? To driving a two-horsed 

 'bus from Huntingdon to Cambridge. 



Nor is the hope permitted that others of his craft as 

 distinguished as he, fared better at the end of laborious 

 lives when fortune should have shone kindliest upon 

 their efforts. John Barker indeed — the Daniel Lambert 

 of the north road — not a swell coachman, but as strong 

 as the man of Gath and as safe as the Bank of Eng- 

 land, was saved the painful experience of seeing his 

 empire ravished away from him by the Great Northern 

 Railway Company ; but he was only saved from this 

 humiliation by a mortification setting in after an accident 

 to his right foot, and what the ultimate fate of Cart- 

 wright was, and what the last engagement of Leech, 

 I scarcely like to consider. Yet few, not excepting 

 even Hennesy, could show greener laurels than they. 



Eor the first of them, Cartwrit{ht — who drove the 



