As coaching progressed and twenty-mile stages replaced the day-long toil of the horses, not only did the six-horse give place to four-horse teams, but coachmen improved. There was need for such improvement, and all the science and resource of which they were capable were put to the proof. Mud, stones, ruts, sandy places to plough through, steep hills to lash his horses up to, and dangerous descents to hold them in, were the commonplaces of the coachman’s career up to the dawning of the nineteenth century. The coaches, too, were heavy and clumsy, and harness now really was rotten, and had every now and again to be mended while the passengers waited with what patience they could command. Happily, time was not “of the essence of the contract,” as the lawyers say, and half a day late was no matter at that period. But all these difficulties made the coachman of those times an expert in many things. He was not of that later kind, finicking in manner and dandies upon the box, but a great, weather-beaten, bluff and gruff creature, mummified in wraps; an expert in getting the last ounce out of his cattle, and ready with his whip, not always because he was brutal by nature, but because he had to thrash the wretched animals to get his coach along at all. The coachmen of those days wore their whips out frequently, and a usual detail of their equipment was the dozen or more of whipcord points in the button-hole, ready to be spliced on--an operation they could perform with ease and efficiency with their teeth while driving. When even the double-thonged whip failed to rouse the poor brutes to super-equine exertions, the “apprentice”--a kind of cat o’ nine tails--was brought into use, and the wheelers thrashed with it. This engine of torture was in later years known familiarly as the “short Tommy,” and was kept in reserve on many provincial coaches. Among those familiar with coaching in its last years, some have asserted the use of this instrument up to the time when coaches themselves disappeared, and others deny it. Both were right and both wrong: on some roads it was on occasion brought forth, while on others it was unknown.