ch enormous strides during the century, had not then found out
that it was possible to use the solid earth as a fulcrum and at the
same time to leave the feet and legs free. A horse used its feet to
draw a coach and why not a man! So the velocipede was constructed for
the rider's feet to just reach the ground, and by pressing first one
foot on the ground and then the other he managed in this undignified
attitude, to propel the thing along!

{153}

Another characteristic thing about the old locomotion was the dog
cart--small carts used by pedlars and others drawn along the high roads
by a dog or dogs. Sometimes these old pedlars would drive to Royston
market with their "carriage and pair" of dogs in rattling style! This
sight was very common during the last century and lingered to about the
end of the coaching days. In the _Gentleman's Magazine_, for 1795, a
writer says: "I have sometimes seen two dogs yoked one on each side of
a barrow drawing regularly and well, similar to ploughing. Their feet
being tender, to prevent their being foot-sore, they should have some
sort of shoeing; perhaps leather would be properest."

So well established had the use of dogs for drawing carts become that
the subject came before Parliament about fifty years ago. An old
magazine of this date gives a kind of petition to Parliament, drawn up
by a village schoolmaster and signed by three small hucksters, setting
forth, like the three historic tailors of Tooley Street, the injured
sense of the "people of England" at the prospect of an interference
with the use of dogs, and praying for the suppression of horses and the
protection of the small trader's dog, "because the dog carts of poor
people were continually, almost, and sometimes quite, run over by these
rough beasts [horses], and that this tyranny and wilfulness is very
difficult for the poor man to bear, who may have as good a spirit as
any coachman, although he is not so high up"!

From as late as about 1855 there comes to the writer a vision of a
pedlar, muddled with drink, riding home in his little square box cart
and the faithful dog drawing the cart and the man as well, and also a
faint echo of "shame" from some bystanders. Verily the fable must in
those days have been true, that when the goddess Fidelity was lost
among men, after long searching, she was found in a dog-kennel!

A picturesque part of the old system of locomotion was, of course, the
turnpike. The keepers o