THE ‘QUICKSILVER’ MAIL
lighted?’—‘Both, sir; blunderbuss and pistols in the sword-case; a lamp each side the coach, and one under the footboard—see to pick up a pin the darkest night of the year.—‘Very fast?’—‘Oh no, sir, just keeps time, and that’s all.’—‘That’s the ‘coach for me, then,’ says our hero.
Unfortunately, the ‘Devonport’ (commonly called the ‘Quicksilver’) mail is half a mile faster in the hour than most in England, and is, indeed, one of the miracles of the road. Let us then picture this unfortunate passenger seated in this mail on a pitch-dark night in November. It is true she has no luggage on the roof, nor much to incommode her elsewhere; but she is a mile in the hour faster than the ‘Comet,’ at least three miles quicker than the ‘Regulator.’ and she performs more than half her journey by lamplight. It is needless to say, then, our senior soon finds out his mistake; but there is no remedy at hand, for it is dead of night, and all the inns are shut up. The climax of his misfortunes then approaches. He sleeps, and awakes on a stage called the fastest on the journey—it is four miles of ground, and twelve minutes is the time. The old gentleman starts from his seat, dreaming the horses are running away. Determined to see if it is so, although the passengers assure him it is ‘all right,’ and assure him he will lose his hat if he looks out of window, he does look out. The next moment he raises his voice in a stentorian shout: ‘Stop, coachman, stop. I have lost my hat and wig!’ The coachman hears him not—and in another second the broad wheels of a road waggon have for ever demolished the lost headgear. And so we leave him, hatless, wigless, to his fate.
V
The late Thomas Adolphus Trollope, brother of the better-known Anthony, was never tired of writing voluminously about old times, and what he has to say about the coaches on the Exeter Road is the more interesting and valuable as coming from one who lived and travelled in the times of which he speaks.
The coaches for the South and West of England, he says, started from the ‘White Horse Cellars,’ Piccadilly, which was one of the fashionable hotels of 1820, the time he treats of.
COACH CONSTRUCTION