PRESERVATION OF HARNESS. 113 



the horses belonged by the kind of animals they were, 

 Many of the horses in the night-coaches, although fast 

 so far as appearance was concerned, would not have 

 been presentable by daylight. Many poor old screws 

 who began their life in a crack day-coach, would after- 

 wards, we are told, under the veil of night, be 

 harnessed to the in-coming or out-going mail, and 

 if not good enough for this, would get drafted down 

 into the country to work some second-rate stage-coach 

 running after sunset. It was over the middle ground 

 — that is, between London and some big town to 

 which the coach was bound — where the inferior horses 

 would be employed. 



Many of the stage-coaches that ran of a night 

 were very much neglected, as it was presumed they 

 would never be seen by daylight. A writer, to whom 

 I have elsewhere referred, says : " The harness was 

 all smeared over with oil, which, so far as I could 

 ever ascertain, was the only article ever used by the 

 night horse-keeper for doing up or preserving his 

 harness. He certainly believed in oil, and from its 

 constant application, there was a thick, hard coating 

 over all the surface of the leather, into which you 

 might dig your nail. The colour, one must presume, 

 had been originally black, but from the oily accumu- 

 lation, mixed, no doubt, with some portions of mud 

 and dust, it had assumed a gray or dusky sort of hue 

 by moon or lamplight." 



And very wise the horse-keepers of past times 

 must have been, notwithstanding this writer's dis- 

 approval of what they did. Oil is an essential and 

 constituent part of good leather, of this I will speak 

 elsewhere in my chapter on harness ; sufficient to say 

 for the present, that leather, like the skin of all 



