282 STAGE-COACH AND MAIL IN DAYS OF YORE 



'bus — went to London daily nntil 1890, returning 

 from the " Old 13ell," Holborn, at five o'clock in 

 the evening. It was the sole survivor of the host 

 of coaches that left London fifty years earlier. 



But two generations have passed aAvay since 

 coaches began to disajipear and to become his- 

 toric, and the " elderly man," with his enviable 

 memories of a long journey in mid-spring or 

 autumn on the outside of a stage-coach, written 

 about l)y George Eliot, is no longer to be found, 

 reminiscent of the times that were. Nay, the 

 locomotive steam-engine itself is doomed, in turn, 

 to be replaced by self-moving electric motor 

 carriages, and avc shall live to drop a salt tear 

 upon an express locomotive retired from active 

 service, or to sigh at sight of a solitary Metro- 

 politan E-ailway engine placed in a museum of 

 things that were. The days of the prophets were 

 not ended with the Bil)lical prognosticators, Avitli 

 Nixon, red-faced or otherwise, or with Mother 

 Shipton, or even with Erasmus Darwin, who, 

 although he could foresee steam and the balloon, 

 could not envisage electricity. They included 

 George Eliot, also, among the prophets, shadowing 

 forth, in a most remarkable way, the Central 

 London Railway and other tube lines of our own 

 time, in this extraordinary j^'^ssage : " Posterity 

 may be shot, like a bullet, through a tube, by 

 atmospheric pressure . . . bat the sIoav, old- 

 fashioned Avav of i^ettini? from one end of our 

 country to the other is the better thing to have 

 in the memory. The tube journey can never lend 



