between London and Herne Bay, and had four hours of jolting in which to recover, was decidedly cheap, and not to be matched nowadays. The traveller of this time would probably select the "Express" from the "Golden Cross," because this was a convenient and central starting-point from which that excellent coach started at an hour when the day was well-aired. The coachman of that time was the ultimate product of the coaching age, and we who travel by train do not see anything like him. He owed something to heredity, for in those days son succeeded to father in all kinds of trades and professions much more frequently than now; for the rest of his somewhat alarming appearance he was indebted partly to the rigours of the weather and partly to the rum-and-milk for which he called at every tavern where the coach stopped-and at a good many where it had no business to stop at all. As a result of these several causes, he generally had cheeks like pulpit cushions, puffy, and of an apoplectic hue, and a plumcoloured nose with red spots on it; he was, in fact, what Shakespeare would call a "purple-hued maltworm." He shaved scrupulously. A rugged beaver hat with a curly brim and a coat of many capes would have identified him as a coachman, even if the evidence of his face had failed, and his talk, which consisted of "Gee-hups," biting repartees administered to passing Jehus, and contemptuous references to the railways, which were just beginning to be spoken of, was solely professional. He was a monumental, not to say awful, figure, unapproachable by the many, but was graciously pleased to accept a jorum from the few people, chiefly county gentlemen, hessianbooted and frock-coated, before whom he grew comparatively humble. For trade he had as much contempt as any German baron with a hundred 66 GRACIOUSLY PLEASED TO ACCEPT A JORUM." quarterings on his ancestral shield and less than a hundred pence in his pockets, and commercial gentlemen were very small beer in his estimation. He is gone now, and we shall never see his like again, but the Londoner who travels much by 'bus may now and again see the faint replicas of him driving from Bayswater to the Bank, from Cornhill to Bow, and by these survivals of a type shall he know what manner of men they were who drove behind four horses the stage- and mail-coaches of sixty years ago. Some of these latter-day coaches went direct from the West End, over Westminster Bridge, and so to the Old Kent Road, but others had to call at various inns on the way to the City, and so came over London Bridge in the approved fashion. III AND the London Bridge by which they would cross in 1837 was a very different structure from that driven over by their forbears of twenty years previously. Its So late as 1831, Old London Bridge remained that, built in 1176, had thus for nearly seven hundred years borne the traffic to and from London, and had stood firmly centuries of storms and floods, and all the attacks of rebels from Norman to late Tudor times. career was closed on the 1st of August, 1831, when the new bridge, that had taken seven years in the building, was opened. The old bridge crossed the Thames at a point about a hundred feet to the eastward of the present one; the city approach leading steeply down a narrow street by Monument Yard, and passing close under the projecting clock of Saint Magnus the |