The stage and mail coachmen were no exotics, but, like every one else, the product of their country and their times; and as those times changed, so did they. The evolution of the smart coachmen of the ’thirties can be followed, step by step, until progress, in the shape of railways, extinguished the species. The original floggers of six horses, who could only get along by dint of severely punishing those unhappy animals throughout the day, were not really coachmen in the later sense. They understood little of the art of coaching, and were merely drivers. From early morn to sundown they lashed the same horses along the rutted ways, with intervals for mending the harness--generally, according to the testimony of the time, the “rotten harness”; but those would have been wonderfully strong traces that could long have withstood the strain they were subjected to, and so they were probably not always so decayed as contemporary accounts would have us believe. Under these circumstances, and the generally hard and rough life they led, it is not to be wondered at that coachmen were originally a rough and brutal class of men. They cannot be paralleled nowadays, and the difference between them and the later ornaments of the box can only be understood by comparing a modern van-driver with the coachman of an aristocratic carriage--and then we should be doing injustice to the van-man. [Illustration: “MY DEAR, YOU’RE A PLUMPER”; COACHMAN AND BARMAID. _After Rowlandson._ ]