5 2 Saddle and Sirloin. 



rather than music, and if any little thing happened 

 during the journeys that tickled his fancy, he would 

 drop Mr. Teather junior, not a line, but a few rhymes, 

 describing it. Those who were up in mail-coach 

 politics, used to have many a roar over the songs 

 which he wrote, whenever anything very good came 

 off; and Jack Creery and Joe Lord never heard the 

 last of his touching description of their sign-post and 

 church-door troubles. According to it, they must 

 have been in as strange a jumble as the Keswick man 

 and his sow, when they tumbled out of Brundholme 

 Wood down a steep bank into the Greta below. The 

 man was asked to describe his sensations as he fell, 

 but he could only say, " Varra queer. First it was 

 sow der me, and then I der soiv ; then soiv top dt me, 

 and I top dt sow rum start a thegither!' 



Jim Byrns was a very handsome and well-educated 

 man, and no one understood his business better. For 

 many years he was on the Edinburgh mail from 

 Derby to Manchester, and afterwards from Preston to 

 Carlisle, over Shap Fells, the most difficult mail-road 

 in England. Those who slip through it now in half 

 an hour, snoozing on comfortable first-class cushions, 

 can never compass the weariness of Hucks Brow, or 

 guess what a guard had to endure, standing up for 

 miles together through those dark and dismal fogs 

 which infest it on a winter's night, and eternally blow- 

 ing his horn to prevent a collision. Sometimes snow 

 would bring the mail to a dead lock, and then the un- 

 happy guard would have to wade, or get out his saddle 

 and ride one of the leaders to a farm-house, and rouse 

 the labourers to come with their shovels. Jim was the 

 right man in the right place, a rare hand at the head 

 of a fatigue party with shovels, and a perfect master 

 of his carpenter's tools, in case there was a breakdown. 

 The heaviest night, as regards correspondence, was 

 when the American mail had come in. On those oc- 

 casions the bags have been known to weigh above 



