THE IIOLYTIEAD ROAD 



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passengers not unnaturalh' to report that they were 

 " mountains high," and some coachmen to state that the 

 snow in some places was higher than their heads as they 

 sat on the box. " Never before," writes a correspondent 

 of the Times of that day (quoted by Captain Malet in 

 his Annals of the Road) — "never before within recollec- 

 tion was the London Mail stopped for a whole night at 

 a few miles from London, and never before have we seen 

 the intercourse between the southern shores of England 

 and the metropolis interrupted for two whole days." In 

 spite of which assertion I read a few sentences on " that 

 the roads leading to Portsmouth and Poole were the 

 only ones kept open during the storm ! " Yet Ports- 

 mouth and Poole are on the " southern shores of England " 

 surely, — and this is but one instance of the incurable 

 slovenliness which marks the compilation of so much of 

 coaching history — and makes the truth-seeker ask what 

 is truth, and wonder where he has got to. 



For the present however we are at St. Albans, where 

 during the prevalence of this great snowstorm of 1836, 

 many mails and coaches remained hopelessly stuck, able 

 neither to get up the road nor down it — a state of affairs 

 v/hich must have caused many passengers to use strange 

 words, and the landlords of the Angel, White Hart, and 

 Woolpack to make hay while the snow fell. And some 

 people were not so fortunate as to be stuck fast in a 

 picturesque place where there was something to eat, as 

 Burdett, the guard of the Liverpool Mail, was able to 

 testify. For on Tuesday, December 27, of this memor- 

 able year, this guard from his vantage point, beheld a 

 chariot buried in the snow and without horses, safely at 

 anchor at about a mile on the London side of St. Albans. 

 And he had no sooner seen it — and two elderly ladies 

 inside it, who rent the welkin with clamorous cries for 

 help — than he found, by being suddenly precipitated 

 head first into twelve feet of snow, that his coach had 

 got into a drift too. Having recovered his perpendicular, 

 and emptied his mouth, a natural curiosity prompted 



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