THE COACH-HORSE.] MOUEBN YETEEINARY PEACTICE. [the coach-house. 



plying for public hire; but tho manner of 

 accomplishing tiie journey was most usually 

 by means of post-coachea. These carriages 

 were supplied by a person of the name of 

 Paul, of the White Lion, who was celebrated 

 at that period all over England for the mag- 

 nificence of his stud. With him it was a 

 hobby, and must have been a very expensive 

 one. He kept no colour but greys, and of 

 these, he had always from thirty to forty pairs 

 in his stables. I can well remember what 

 splendid cattle they were — his boys wearing 

 black velvet caps, gold bands and tassels, and 

 yellow silk jackets. He built his own car- 

 riages, dark brown, lined with scarlet morocco 

 — doing the whole thing upon a grand scale. 

 A party of six, with one or two servants, 

 would contract with Paul for a set down in 

 London. He sent with them one of his own 

 carriages, with its team of greys, and postil- 

 lions : they accomplished the stages as ar- 

 ranged every day — probably of five-and-twenty 

 miles each — and at the end of eight or nine 

 days found themselves in the metropolis. 

 With this fashion of travelling commenced my 

 experience of the road ; having made my first 

 visit to Babylon the Great through the agency 

 of one of these long jobs. At a later date I 

 can call to mind, on an occasion of being sent 

 for home in the Midsummer holidays, sticking 

 fast in the middle of the turnpike-road be- 

 tween Whitchurch and Malpas — the latter 

 certainly no misnomer. This antecedent of 

 M'Adam was a desert of red sand, quartered 

 by cart-wheels to the depth of two or three 

 feet ; and as the phaeton in which I made my 

 journey ran upon wheels of about half the 

 diameter of those by which the ruts had been 

 formed, of course we were let in up to the 

 axles, where we were anchored. Thio took place 

 in the nineteenth century!" 



Long before the commencement of the pre- 

 sent century, however, many of the leading 

 lines from the metropolis, for a circle of from 

 twenty to fifty miles around it, were far ad- 

 vanced towards their present excellence ; but 

 ■where a journey of two or three hundred miles 

 was to be performed, it went so small a way in 

 the matter of expedition, that the first sixth- 

 part of it could be accomplished at eight miles 

 an hour, where the remainder could with diffi- 

 culty be done at a better speed than four. 



A\nien the use of carriages first began to 

 supersede the old method of transporting mea 

 and merchandise upon horseback, it became 

 absolutely necessary to devise some plan for 

 formuig a solid surface upon the bridle-ways 

 of sand, which off-ered as little support to a 

 wheel as a fallow to the coulter of a plough. 

 Hence arose the system of paving the coutro 

 of the turnpike-roads, so generally adopted in 

 most of the midland counties, and of wliich 

 many specimens are still in existence, more 

 particularly in Cheshire and Lancashire. With 

 the heavy waggons, and their slow pace, while 

 the great reduction in the draught upon this 

 pavement effected a vast saving in the horses, 

 the roughness of the surface was felt as no 

 inconvenience. The gentry, in their coaches 

 suspended from flexible C springs, passed 

 smoothly-over them ; and, as it was almost tho 

 universal fashion to drive from the saddle, 

 accompanied by outriders, the servants also 

 escaped dislocation. But there was a class of 

 devoted wretches for whom no such good luck 

 was found, and who, in an honest effort to 

 procure their daily bread, underwent the 

 agonies of an earthly purgatory without any 

 parallel in a Christian land. When Mr. 

 Palmer invented mail-coaches, as might be ex- 

 pected, he committed a few small oversights ; 

 among these were the boxes of the coachmen, 

 which were without springs, and were con- 

 structed upon the common principle. The 

 consequence was, that the scats upon which 

 tliey were destined to perform their vocations, 

 were pieces of pine, or other obdurate plank, 

 supported upon standards springing from the 

 beds of the fore-axles. These " devil's sedans" 

 were covered with a tanned bull's hide, to 

 which, as a material for sitting on, granite is 

 as an air cushion. An old sufferer, who for 

 the last ten years of his life drove between 

 Chester and Birkenhead, was on the Holyhead 

 mail from Chester to Stafford in those hard 

 times for dragsmen. For better than five- 

 and-thirty years this martyr was a most com- 

 municative coachman, and, withal, had an am- 

 bition for saying smart things. On one occa- 

 sion, when asked how his constitution could 

 have supported such inhuman exercise, and 

 whether it had not proved fatal to men less 

 robust than he was ? " Why, sir," he replied, 

 " it was well enough when once we got used to 



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