On the day after that he spent at the coach-maker’s, Pepys, on his return from office, takes his wife for a drive: “We went alone through the town with our new liveries of serge, and the horses’ manes and tails tied with red ribbons and the standards there gilt with varnish, and all clean, and green reins, that people did mightily look upon us; and the truth is, I did not see any coach more pretty, though more gay, than ours, all the day.” Samuel Pepys’ child-like pride in his carriage was no doubt a source of amusement to his contemporaries, but it has had the result of giving us more minute details concerning the carriages of Charles II.’s time than we can obtain from the pages of any other writer. THE FIRST STAGE COACHES. We must now turn to the stage coach which had come into vogue about the year 1640.[11] Chamberlayne,[12] writing in 1649, says:— [11] _History of the Art of Coach Building._ By George A. Thrupp, 1876. [12] _The Present State of Great Britain._ By Chamberlayne, 1649. “There is of late such an admirable commodiousness, both for men and women, to travel from London to the principal towns of the country that the like hath not been known in the world, and that is by stage coaches, wherein any one may be transported to any place sheltered from foul weather and foul ways, free from endamaging one’s health and one’s body by hard jogging or over violent motion on horseback, and this not only at the low price of about a shilling for every five miles, but with such velocity and speed in one hour as the foreign post can make but in one day.” There were two classes of coach in the seventeenth century. Mons. Misson[13] says, “There are coaches that go to all the great towns by moderate journeys; and others which they call flying coaches that will travel twenty leagues a day and more. But these do not go to all places.” He also refers to the waggons which “lumber along but heavily,” and which he says are used only by a few poor old women. Four or four miles and a half in the hour was the speed of the ordinary coach. [13] _Memoirs and Observations of a Journey in England_, 1697. The coaches that travelled between London and distant towns were similar in construction to the hackney coach, which plied for hire in the streets, but were built on a larger scale. They carried eight passengers inside, and behind, over the axle, was a great basket for baggage and outside passengers, who made themselves as comfortable as they might in the straw supplied. The “insides” were protected from rain and cold by leather curtains; neither passengers nor baggage were carried on the roof; and the coachman sat on a bar fixed between the two standard posts from which the body was hung in front, his feet being supported by a footboard on the perch.