h we now look down
upon these things ought to make us humble in our estimate of the future!
We have far surpassed the wildest dreams of those days, but there were
some points of picturesque interest in which we can never surpass them.
Ah! boys," said Solomon, looking up with a gleam of enthusiasm in his
eyes, "I mind the old mail-coaches well. They had for a long time
before I knew them reached their best days. It was about the year 1820
that most of the post-roads had been macadamised, and the service had
reached its highest state of efficiency. In 1836 there were fifty
four-horse mails in England, thirty in Ireland, and ten in Scotland,
besides forty-nine two-horse mails in England. Those who have not seen
the starting of the mail-coaches from the General Post-Office can never
understand the magnificence and excitement of that scene. The coaches
were clean, trim, elegant, and glittering; the blood-horses were the
finest that could be procured, groomed to perfection, and full of fire;
the drivers and guards were tried and trusty men of mettle, in bright
scarlet costume--some of the former being lords, baronets, and even
parsons! It was a gay and stirring sight when the insides and outsides
were seated, when the drivers seized their reins, and the bugles
sounded, the whips cracked, the impatient steeds reared, plunged, or
sprang away, and the Royal Mails flew from the yard of St.
Martin's-le-Grand towards every corner of the Kingdom.

"Their progress, too, was a sort of royal progress--a triumphal march.
Wherever they had to pass, crowds of people waited for them in subdued
excitement, hailed them with delight, and waved them on with cheers, for
they were almost the only means of distributing news; and when a great
victory, such as Trafalgar, Vittoria, or Waterloo had to be announced,
the mail-coaches--dressed in flowers and ribbons, with guards shouting
the news to eager crowds as they passed through hamlet, village, and
town--swept like a thrill of electric fire throughout the land. News
_was_ news in those days! You didn't get it at all till you got it
altogether, and then you got it like a thunderbolt. There was no
dribbling of advance telegrams; no daily papers to spread the news (or
lies), and contradict 'em next day, in the same columns with
commentaries or prophetic remarks on what might or should have been, but
wasn't, until news got muddled up into a hopeless entanglement, so that
when all was at last