In the print just mentioned there is shown a second coach, which is perhaps a better example of the carriage of the period. One sees again its hearse-like appearance, though the top is broader than the bottom, and the body is partially enclosed; but there is one peculiarity which deserves particular mention. This was a small seat which projected on either side, between the wheels. It was known as the boot. Here sat the pages or grooms or the ladies in attendance. Taylor, of course, has his fling against it. The booted coach, he says, is like a perpetual cheater, wears “two Bootes and no Spurs, sometimes having two paire of Legs and one boote; and oftentimes (against nature) most preposterously it makes faire Ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are carrried backe to backe like people surpriz’d by Pyrats to be tyed in that miserable manner, and throwne overboard into the Sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate Sea-crabs, in being drawne Side-wayes, as they are when they sit in the boote of the Coach.” The boot, however, was already tending to disappear in Taylor’s day. How it originated is not clear. It was always uncovered, whence followed much hardship, particularly if the weather was unfavourable. Nor can one think that it was very capacious. There is an early seventeenth-century pamphlet entitled _My Journie_, in which a stout old lady is put into the boot of a coach, and cannot move. When going uphill all the passengers are supposed to get out and walk, but the old lady, once settled, refuses to budge, and, indeed, cannot be extricated until the end of the journey. There is further mention of the discomfort in a boot in 1663, when Edward Barker, writing to his father, a Lancashire squire, complains of his troubles in the side seat. “I got to London,” he says, “on Saturday last, my journey was noe ways pleasant, being forced to ride in the boote all the waye, yͤ company yᵗ came up wᵗͪ mee were persons of greate quality as knightes and ladyes. My journeys expence was 30 _s._ This traval hath soe indisposed mee, yᵗ I am resolved never to ride againe in yͤ coatch. I am extreamly hot and feverish.” The monstrous width of these early coaches followed, of course, on their projecting side seats, which only entirely disappeared when the coach had come to be completely enclosed and provided with glass windows. It may be that the boot in process of time was metamorphosed into the large, deep, four-sided basket which was strapped to the back of public coaches in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, indeed, this basket seems to have been called the boot in eighteenth-century stage coaches. It was probably in such a basket-boot as this that Mr. Pepys put his great barrel of oysters, “as big as sixteen others,” which was given him in 1664.