THE STAGE-WAG GON!s lii 



shelter and the society that tlie interior of the 

 stage-waggons afforded. Other reasons existed, 

 little suspected by the present generation, Avhose 

 great main roads, at any rate, are well defined and 

 excellently Avell kept. No one, nowadays, once 

 set upon the great roads to York and Edinburgh, 

 to Exeter, to Portsmouth, Dover or Bath, need 

 ask his way. It is only necessary to keep straight 

 ahead. In those old days, however, when travellers 

 could describe the visible road as being a narrow 

 track three feet wide, occasionally rising out of the 

 23rofound depths of mud and water on either side, 

 no one who could afford to pay Avould walk, even 

 assuming the very doubtful physical possibility of 

 struggling through such sloughs afoot. 



In 1739 two Glasgow merchants, going horse- 

 back from Glasgow by Edinburgh to London, 

 found no turnpike road until they had gone 

 three-quarters of their journey, and were come 

 to Grantham. Up to that point they travelled on 

 a narrow causeway, and met from time to time 

 strings of pack-horses, thirty to forty in a gang, 

 carrying goods. The leading horse of each gang 

 carried a bell, to give warning to travellers coming 

 from an opposite direction. The narrow causeway 

 not affording room to pass, the horsemen were 

 obliged to make room for the pack-horses and 

 plunge into the mud, out of which they sometimes 

 found it difficult to get back upon the road again. 

 Those were the times when coachmen, often finding 

 the old roads impassable, would make new routes 

 for themselves across a country not merely strange 



