ACCIDENTS 203 



stricken, and in their dismay took the coach into a 

 ditch. 



The state of the weather had an appreciable effect 

 on the number of coaching accidents. Fog was the thing 

 most dreaded hy coachmen, for when walls of inky 

 blackness surrounded the coach, and rendered the 

 leaders almost indistinguishable, it was no easy task to 

 keep the coach on the road. When the metropolis was 

 enveloped in the yellow haze of a London fog, the mails 

 used to be escorted out of town by men on horseback 

 carrying torches, to enable the coachmen to discern the 

 track at all. On such occasions progress was necessarily 

 slow, and the string of coaches crawling one behind the 

 other sometimes took three hours to get from London 

 to Hounslow. 



During a hard winter when England was in the grip 

 of regular arftic weather, with ice on the Thames, and 

 birds perishing from the intense cold, the streets of 

 London were almost deserted, and the few hackney- 

 carriages which ventured out were drawn by four 

 horses, whilst the situation of the coaches in the pro- 

 vinces was one of extreme peril. The Post Office officials 

 were in a great state of mind about their mails, and at 

 once despatched superintendents to the country dis- 

 tridls with the view of helping those guards whose 

 coaches were unable to proceed. From all sides came 

 reports of dangers and disasters. 



The Wisbech coach was buried in a snow-drift; 

 the guard took one of the horses and struggled forward 

 with the mails, but before he had gone any distance he 



