THE HORSE. 221 



under particular consideration. The wages, it seems, 

 of coachmen of the highest attainments, do not 

 amount to more than eighteen shillings or a pound 

 per week, yet some of them make from two to four 

 hundred pounds a year and upwards. Indeed I have 

 known some few retire from the road with a hand- 

 some independence for the remainder of their lives. 

 One of these, Mr. Mason, the successor of Abram 

 Stragler, who drove the Colchester fast coach, during 

 perhaps nearly thirty years ; and a steadier or more 

 respectable man never sat upon a coachbox. The 

 coachman's fee, and I think, under all circum- 

 stances, no liberal man can travel comfortably with- 

 out giving it, ought, according to Nimrod, to be one 

 shilling under, and two shillings for any distance 

 above thirty miles. This is the common rate, and 

 surely not overdoing the thing, whether in reference 

 to inside or outside passengers ; it is so much the 

 custom for persons of property to take the outside by 

 choice, particularly the box. Nimrod observes very 

 justly, that a coachman cannot drive more than 

 seventy miles a day with safety to his constitution ; 

 and that, to be safe, should be done at two starts. 

 Some few, indeed, and with apparent impunity, have 

 greatly exceeded such daily performance ; and there 

 is now living in Whitechapel, an old Norwich coach- 

 man, keeping a public house, who is supposed to 

 have done more road work, and to have continued it 

 longer than any other man. In the old time, that is 

 to say, in my young time, when I used occasionally 

 to mount the box of the old Ipswich blue coach and 

 six, the postilion, a poor lad of fourteen, was at 



