226 ON THE TRACK OF THE MAIL-COACH 



had on stockings about five shades lighter than his 

 drab coat.' 



If Newcastle was practically the Border town for 

 the east-coast mails to Edinburgh, Carlisle, closer 

 still to the boundary, w^as even more in evidence as 

 the distributing-point for Scotland generally. 



Whether the London mail for Glasgow, avoiding 

 Carlisle, passed through Edinburgh, as at one time, 

 or whether Glasgow received its mail via Wetherby 

 and Carlisle, as at the beginning of the Victorian era, 

 the Border city, besides sending off mails for Dumfries, 

 Ayr, and Portpatrick, had to provide for the transit 

 of letters between the great Lancashire towns and 

 Glasgow and Edinburgh. 



The mail-coaches from the South for Scotland 

 drove, on arrival at Carlisle, one day to the Bush, m 

 English Street, and the next to the Crown and 

 Mitre, at the head of Castle Street, scarcely a stone' s- 

 throw from the Cathedral, and little more from the 

 Castle. 



But the traveller of the thirties would fail to recog- 

 nize to-day, in the Bush — pulled down and rebuilt 

 nearly on the same site twenty years ago — the coach- 

 ing inn of his youth. The quaint features of the old 

 time have given way before modern ideas. He would 

 see little change in th^ other inn, now better known 

 as the Coffee House, which externally, at any rate, 

 is just as it w^as when the Glasgow coach-horses — 

 breathless with the final run from the lower level of 



