BOUND FOR THE BORDER 223 



attended the consequent sale. It is he who to-day 

 receives his London letters, not by the rattling coach, 

 but in the railway bag put out at Huntingdon by the 

 mail-train from King's Cross. 



Wetherby, one hundred and ninety-four miles from 

 London, is 202J from Glasgow, but it lies nearly 

 midway between London and Edinburgh by the 

 Boroughbridge mail-coach road. The latter important 

 fact left its mark— perhaps it may even yet be trace- 

 able — on the front wall of the Angel Inn — which was 

 thought to be more exactly midway than it is — and to 

 which the mails ran for perhaps half a century. 

 Around it the chief postal interest of the little town 

 gathers. 



For there, when the mail-coaches were put upon 

 the road, was established the Wetherby post-office. 

 The legend obtains that the house is so old that, 

 when it had to be done up, nine wall-papers were 

 stripped off in succession. Underneath the last layer 

 were found frescoes of unknown date. 



The inn, shorn of the extensions to which a 

 flourishing road-trade gave rise, remains very much 

 as it appeared in the coaching days — an old, low 

 building of tw^o stories, with a great frontage to the 

 road. Its stabling, now numbered with the past, 

 took in a hundred horses. 



A curious feature in the history of Wetherby is 

 that in 1824 the whole town was sold in seventy-two 

 lots for £168,000, and in 1878 the only purchaser of 

 a lot then alive was the postmaster, Mr. J. Smith. 



