COACH CONSTRUCTION 27 



midnight, or even at three or four o'clock in the 

 morning ; ourselves the only souls awake in all the 

 place. What speculations as to the immediate 

 bestowal and occupation of the coachman as he " left 

 you here, sir," in the small hours ! ' 



Then he goes on to give a kind of gossipy history 

 of the smart mails put on the road about 1820. 



' A new and accelerated mail-coach service was 

 started under the title of the " Devonport Mail," at 

 that time the fastest in England. Its performances 

 caused a sensation in the coaching world, and it was 

 known in such circles as the " Quicksilver Mail." Its 

 early days had chanced, unfortunately, to be marked 

 by two or three accidents, which naturally gave it an 

 increased celebrity. 



' And if it is considered what those men and horses 

 were required to perform, the wonder was, not that 

 the " Quicksilver " should have come to grief two or 

 three times, but rather that it ever made its journey 

 without doing so. What does the railway traveller 

 of the present day, who sees a travelling Post Office 

 and its huge tender, crammed with postal matter, 

 think of the idea of carrying all that mass on one, or 

 perhaps two, coaches ? The guard, occupying his 

 solitary post behind the coach on the top of the 

 receptacle called, with reference to the constructions 

 of still earlier days, the hinder-hoot, sat on a little 

 seat made for one, with his pistol and blunderbuss in 

 a box in front of him. And the original notion of 

 those who first planned the modern mail coach was 

 that the bags containiuo- the letters should be carried 

 in the hinder - boot. The fore - l^oot, beneath the 



