It was not often that the coachmen were so outspoken as the hero of the following tale. “What do you expect?” asked a passenger new to the road of him when collecting the customary tips at the end of his stage. That ornament of the box was blunt and frank: “Gents generally gives me a shilling; fools with more money than brains gives me half a crown,” he said. What, in that case, could the passenger do but proclaim himself, in the amount of his gratuity, a “gent” with a superfluity of brains over cash, even though the coachman-philosopher was a loser to the extent of one-and-sixpence? CHAPTER X THE LATER COACHMEN The smart coachmen came into existence with short stages and the fast day-coaches, about 1824. They did not burst suddenly upon an astonished world--were not, like those insect-wonders, chrysalids in the morning and butterflies in the afternoon--but developed by insensible degrees. The first incentive to this improvement was, doubtless, that acquaintance with the moneyed sporting world which began when the country gentlemen ceased to travel horseback and took to going by coach, and thence, from passive passengers, developed an interest in driving; sitting beside the coachman and learning from him something of what those worthies now, for the first time in their lives, began dimly to perceive was an art, and not merely an ordinary wage-earning occupation. When Jack Bailey, of the old “Prince of Wales,” who taught old John Warde, the first of the amateurs, how to drive, tutored him, he wrought a greater revolution than he knew. Acquaintance with, and tutorship of, the growing ranks of the amateurs brought a strange alteration in themselves. They taught the young sprigs of nobility coaching, and their pupils unconsciously initiated them in new manners of thought, speech and dress. The two classes strangely reacted on one another, for while the coachmen learned to discard top-boots and took to trousers, the amateurs thought it a fine thing to file their front teeth, so that they could splice whip-points and spit like the professionals, to wear the heavy “double Benjamins,” clumsy and many-caped, that were necessary for the coachmen, and to be, in fact, as thoroughly “down the road” in dress, manner and talk as though they were professionals themselves. Each exaggerated the most remarkable features of the other, so that the coachmen became caricature gentlemen, and the gentlemen the most wonderful travesties of the coachmen.