1 86 STAGE-COACH AN'D MAIL IN DAYS OF YORE 



When it Lecamc clear to coach-proprietors that 

 a coachman couhl drive a Ioniser distance Avhen 

 his body was not racked so intolerably, they 

 provided springs, and risked the remote chance of 

 coachmen g'oing to sleep on the hox. 



Another reform, humane to the liorses and 

 dii-ectly productive of increased speed and effi- 

 ciency on the road, was the introduction of shorter 

 stages. Prom those almost incrediT)le times when 

 a coach went from end to end of a long trip and 

 returned with the same team, to those when the 

 stages were twenty miles long constituted, no 

 doiiht, a great advance; hut that was hy this time 

 no longer sufficient. Tlu.' mail stages, as Ave have 

 seen, rarely at the earliest times exceeded ten 

 miles, and were often much less. The mails also 

 travelled at night, a thing the stage-coaches did 

 not in the old times dare attempt. In the early 

 days of Pennant, and other chroniclers contempo- 

 rary with liim, the coaches inned every evening. 

 None dared travel when the sun had set and 

 darkness brooded over the land, for there were not 

 only the highwaymen to 1)e feared — and they still 

 continued to increase— but the badness of the 

 roads had constituted a danger even more dreaded. 

 Now, however, roads — thanks to Post Office 

 insistence — were greatly improved; and if the 

 mails could go througli the darkness, why not 

 also the stages ? Coincident with these things, 

 great minds perceived that by changing horses 

 every ten miles or so, and coaclimen at intervals, 

 a coach might, in the first jjlace, be made to go 



