there was one stage-coach between
the two cities, which did the distance in a fortnight, rendering
communication and reply possible once in each month. In those days
roads were uncommonly bad. One writer tells us that, while travelling
in Lancashire, a county now traversed by railways in all directions, he
found one of the principal roads so bad that there were ruts in it,
which he measured, four feet deep, and that the only mending it received
was the tumbling of stones into these holes to fill them up. The
extremely limited goods traffic of the country was conducted by the slow
means of carts and waggons. Enterprising men, however, then as now,
were pushing the world forward, though they were by no means so numerous
then as now. In 1673 it took a week to travel between London and
Exeter, and cost from forty to forty-five shillings. About the same
period a six-horse coach took six days to perform the journey between
Edinburgh and Glasgow and back. To accomplish fifty miles or
thereabouts in two days with a six-horse stage-coach, was considered
good work and high speed about the beginning of last century. Near the
middle of it (1740) travelling by night was for the first time
introduced, and soon after that a coach was started with a wicker-basket
slung behind for outside passengers! Some years afterwards an
enterprising individual started a "flying coach" drawn by eight horses,
which travelled between London and Dover in a day--the fare being one
guinea. Even at the beginning of the present century four miles an hour
was deemed a very fair rate of travelling for a stage-coach.

With the improvement of roads by the famous Macadam in 1816, began
improved travelling and increased speed. The process was rapid.
Mail-coaches began to overrun the country in all directions at the then
remarkable pace of from eight to ten miles an hour,--and, let us remark
in passing, there was a whirl and dash about these stage-coaches which
railway trains, with all their velocity can never hope to attain to,
except when they dash into each other! Man is but a weak creature in
some senses. Facts are scarcely facts to him unless they touch his eye
or ear. The smooth run of a train at twenty or even thirty miles an
hour, with its gradual start and gentle pull up, has but a slight effect
on him now compared with the splendid swing of the well-appointed mail
coach of old as it swept round the bend of a road, and, with red-coated
dri