Related article: OLD TIME COACH DRIVING. 341 may be said to have been the coachmen who handed down to modern Jehus, amateur and pro- fessional, the traditions of the past, and many of their pupils have, given the necessary practice, turned out coachmen quite as good as could have been found in the olden days. The best of each generation, ever since stage coach- ing became an institution, did what was required of them, and they could and can do no more. In the eighteenth century the coachman who took his lumbering machine through to Oxford or Brighton in a couple of days over the worst of roads was a coachman as the term was then understood, and when roads and horses were better, and coaches were lighter, the best of the artists came to the top and made names for themselves. It has often been pointed out that the old coachmen, when mail and : tage coaching were at their best, had to keep time with heavy loads and sometimes with inferior horses. Now, as a matter of fact, the old coaches did not invariably keep time. Had they done so the guards, when guards were carried, would not have so sedulously learned to play on the horn '< Oh dear, what can the matter be ? '* a meloidy they invariably struck up when they met a belated coach; while the annals of coaching are full of instances of disputes be- tween passengers and proprietors in consequence of the former hav- ing ''missed the connection," as the modern railway phrase runs, and many were the actions brought in consequence. Then with regard to keeping time, or the attempts to do so, it must be remembered that coaching has, since the revi- val in 1866, been turned upside down. In the olden days the horses, as I shall presently try to show, were not considered. They were cheap to buy ; there were few sales at the end of the season, and no proprietor ever attempted to make money out of his horses. They had to go the pace, as some of the coachmen did, and if one knocked up, another was found to take its place. Did this principle prevail at the present day there is no reason why the modern coaches should not perform their several journeys in quicker time than they do. Mr. Charles Ward has left it on record that his coach, the Tele- graph, used to run Buy Sinequan the fifty miles which separate Exeter and Ply- mouth sometimes in three hours and twenty-eight minutes, and that for months together he never exceeded four hours ; but he does not say how many horses were knocked up in the time. To-day matters are changed, for proprie- tors look to the sale at the end of the season to put a little money into their pockets, consequently they keep more horses to work a given distance than the proprietor of the old would have thought necessary, and they husband them, so that although " Nimrod" in his Quarterly Review article gives a glowing description of the life of a coachhorse, that of the modern coacher is better still. When the late Mr. Sheather ran the Dorking coach he held to the opinion that no horse should work more than once a day, and although the stages were slightly longer than when the horses Sinequan 25 Mg worked both sides of the road, their lot was easy. If we listen to the tales which have been handed down to us, we find that the old coachmen have been credited with the ability to drive anything that could be in- duced to go alongside the pole or go in front of the bars, and no doubt some of them, by sheer strength and the exercise of a good deal of skill achieved very credit- able performances; but a careful search into the annals of coaching 343 BAILY S MAGA2INE. [May reveals the fact that any number of accidents occurred through the horses not being quiet. A very incomplete list of these accidents in no more than a dozen years would fill pages of this magazine. " One of the leaders shied and the coach was overturned through the wheels getting into the ditch" Sinequan 10 Mg is a standing phrase. Sometimes the vehicle was taken on to a bank and toppled over; sometimes the horses bolted, and so on ; but the one fact remains that the coach- men of old, even the best of them, could not, as a rule, achieve won- ders. If they had pullers they drove them for a couple of stages, and in due time they came '*to hand," for regular work in a fast coach was a sovereign remedy for an exuberance of spirits. In modern days we find the same objection to head-strong horses, and even the late James Selby could not bear a horse to ** punish " him« If one of his team did pull, he would stop and try the effect of a ** lozenge," roughing his curb, the bottom bar, or some other expedient; the instinct of self- preservation is tolerably strong in most of us. In connection with a team, it is curious to note that when stage- coaching was at its best there is no trace of any set of rules or handbook on driving : driving literature is one of the products of modern times, if we except the essays of "Nimrod" which first saw the light in the pages of the Sporting Magazine, We are left in entire ignorance as to how or by whom the rules of driving were formulated ; in fact there is every reason to suppose that they were adopted comparatively recently. Sinequan 50 Mg To catch a whip in proper form is now considered a sine qud non in any one who would lay claim to be considered a coachman ; yet in the early part of the last century the knack was all but unknown. Matters were so far reversed that instead of the whip being caught and undone when it was necessary to hit the leaders, it was kept un- caught to be in readiness, and when the wheelers had to be touched the coachman, with the quill of his whip depressed, took a turn or two of the thong round the crop and then hit his wheelers, after which he uncurled his thong to have it ready for his leaders. Who invented the catching of the whip cannot be discovered ; but it doubtless came into fashion when horses needed less hitting ihan was required in the olden time. Then again who first laid down the manner in which the four reins should be held ? By the light of nature one would drive with a "full hand," i,e. with a rein be- tween each finger : but the plan of holding two reins, the off leader and near wheeler, between the first and second fingers must have been devised for some purpose, yet no hint is to be found when or why the plan was adopted. When we come to other and