Coaching days! The words carry us back a hundred years or more, and bring to our minds gay, romantic pictures of scarlet-clad postilions, prancing horses, and a rosy-faced driver with his long whip and quaint three-tiered cape. We seem to hear the merry sound of the horns, the ring of hoofs, and the rattle of harness, as the coach, with its passengers and piled baggage, clatters along a broad high road or draws up at the open door of some old-fashioned English inn. Those are the eighteenth-century days that we call to mind, the days when coaching was at its height, but we must go further back than that if we want to find the origin of this form of conveyance, and to see how it developed out of the clumsy wagons and quaint whirlicotes and charettes of mediÆval times.

We first hear of coaches in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and they are said to have been introduced into England in 1594 by a coachman who was a native of Holland. There is an old picture of the great queen riding in one of her new equipages on some state occasion. It was open at the sides, had a high roof decorated with waving plumes, and was drawn by two richly caparisoned horses.

At first, it appears, coaches were reserved for the use of royalty, but Stowe tells us that "after a while divers great ladies made them coaches and rid in them up and down the country, to the great admiration of all beholders." He goes on to say that within twenty years coach-making became an important trade in England.

These coaches were very different from those of later times, for they were open at the sides and the wheels were very small and low. In shape they were not unlike the state coach that is still used at coronations and other great occasions.

During the seventeenth century many alterations and improvements took place in coach-building both in England and France, and in 1620 we find Louis XIV. driving in a carriage with glass sides. In the reign of this monarch, too, a curious light two-wheeled conveyance was introduced. It was called a flignette and very much resembled a modern dog-cart.

In the eighteenth century greater progress was made as roads improved. Sedan chairs came into use, and ladies rode pillion fashion, sitting on a cushion behind the saddle of the horseman.

Hired carriages, too, began to be seen in the streets of Paris, and in 1625 they appeared in London. Very few of them were allowed at first, but in 1634 an old sea-captain named Baily established a stand for hackney coaches near the Maypole in the Strand, and by the end of the century there were no fewer than eight hundred of these vehicles in the City and suburbs.

Stage coaches to carry both passengers and mails were the next innovation, and they were soon running regularly during summer on three of the principal high roads of England. Nowadays, when we can travel from one end of the country to the other in a few hours, we should think the old conveyances very slow coaches indeed, but at the end of the seventeenth and during the eighteenth centuries they were thought marvels of swiftness. It took a week—only a week, people said then—to go from London to York, and the journey to Manchester could actually be made in four days.

In Hogarth's pictures we can see what an early stage coach was like, with its large, clumsy wheels, high roof, and an enormous basket at the back in which baggage was carried and where passengers who wished to travel cheaply could sit. Later on this basket developed into an extra back seat, and in a picture painted in 1834 there is a coach with no less than three separate compartments, besides having seats on the roof.

In 1784 sixteen coaches left London every day, and it was one of the sights of the City to see them start from the General Post Office on their journeys. Each vehicle had an armed guard, for those were the days of highwaymen, and it was no uncommon thing for travellers to be stopped and robbed by gentlemen of the road.

Dick Turpin was one of these thieves, and for a long time he terrorised Epping Forest and the outskirts of London, and another famous—or infamous—robber was the young Frenchman Claud Duval, about whom many romantic tales are told. On one occasion he returned the jewels that he had stolen from a beautiful lady, on condition that she would descend from her carriage and dance a measure with him on the open road.

It is difficult now to realise what our highways were like a hundred years ago and more, when coaching was at its height. Then the great roads were crowded with traffic, post-chaises, stage wagons, and pack-horses. Now it is sad to see the same roads narrowed to half their former width by broad borders of grass that have been allowed to grow.

In those days there were many private travelling carriages besides the public coaches. A most interesting one is now in London at Madame Tussaud's. This is the wonderful coach which belonged to Napoleon Buonaparte. In it the great emperor rode back from Russia after the burning of Moscow, and later on from Cannes to Paris on his triumphal progress through France in 1815.

It is said that Napoleon himself designed the fittings of this carriage, for it contained everything necessary for a long journey, and was intended to serve the purpose of a bedroom, a dining-room, and a kitchen. The coach was captured by a German officer after the Battle of Waterloo, the emperor making his escape on horseback; and having been purchased by a man named Bullock, it was exhibited through the whole of the United Kingdom.

Gradually, as time went on, railways superseded the picturesque old coaches. They continued to be used, however, in less civilised countries, and can still be seen in the wild forest districts of Australia, New Zealand, and America.

In the early pioneer days of the United States these coaches, with their loads of passengers and mails, sometimes encountered bands of Red Indians in their journeys across the prairies, and there are stories of terrible disasters and narrow escapes when the travellers were pursued and attacked by the savages.

Those exciting times have passed away now, but coaches have not entirely disappeared. In Hyde Park on Sunday mornings before the War we could see the beautiful vehicles of the Four-in-hand Club to remind us of how our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers travelled in the merry—but, perhaps, rather dangerous—days of old.