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. [Illustration: A MEDIÆVAL COACH.] 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. [Illustration: AN OLD FAMILY COACH.] 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. [Illustration: RIDING PILLION FASHION.] 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. [Illustration: SEDAN CHAIR.] 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. [Illustration: POST-CHAISE.] 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. [Illustration: IN THE WILD WEST.]