The coach started at seven o’clock, with six fine horses. There was no postilion for the leaders, as was customary in our coaching days. The driver divided the reins between both hands, and off we started at a gallop. Perhaps some of the Shyennese, who witnessed our dashing departure, would not have been sorry to have left the place with us. The coach was full. It was constructed (but without the befitting capacity) to carry nine persons inside and three outside. Experience only can enable one to comprehend how much packing and squeezing and contriving are requisite for arranging nine persons in a space barely sufficient for six. You must imagine a coach a size larger than our old stages; and when three persons have been jammed into the front, and as many into the back seat, a bench is let down from the side which reaches from door to door—and on this three more persons, to speak ironically, are accommodated. Though it was mid-winter, I should have liked my neighbours all the better had they been a little further off. What then must be the effects of such proximity on an American summer-day, with the thermometer on the roof of the coach at 120°, and a cloud of prairie dust pouring in at the window? If one of these Western coaches—destined for its whole existence to work on the plains and mountains, and never to pass over a furlong of made road, could have been exhibited in London and Paris in ’62 and ’67, people on this side would have been astonished at the strength of their springs, and of the whole of their construction.