The placing of springs under the driving-box was due to the suggestion of John Warde, earliest of the coaching amateurs, who had been taught the art of driving a stage-coach by Jack Bailey, a famed coachman on the old “Prince of Wales,” between London and Birmingham. He had found the jolting received directly from the axle an intolerable infliction on a long drive, and urged coach-proprietors to provide springs. Said “Mr. Wilkins of the ‘Balloon’”--a character in Nimrod’s _Life of a Sportsman_--“they do say they are going to put the boxes of all stage-coaches on springs, but Heaven knows when that will be--not in my time, I fear. Our people say it won’t do; we shall go to sleep on them. No danger of a man doing that now, even if he should be a bit overtaken with drink.” Under these circumstances there was, as Mr. Wilkins went on to show, “a great deal of _hart_ in sitting on a coach-box,” as well as driving four horses. “Your body must go with the swing of the box, and let your lines (loins, he meant) be as lissom as you can. It would kill a man in a week to drive as far as I do, if he did not do as I say.” When it became clear to coach-proprietors that a coachman could drive a longer distance when his body was not racked so intolerably, they provided springs, and risked the remote chance of coachmen going to sleep on the box. Another reform, humane to the horses and directly productive of increased speed and efficiency on the road, was the introduction of shorter stages. From those almost incredible times when a coach went from end to end of a long trip and returned with the same team, to those when the stages were twenty miles long constituted, no doubt, a great advance; but that was by this time no longer sufficient. The mail stages, as we have seen, rarely at the earliest times exceeded ten miles, and were often much less. The mails also travelled at night, a thing the stage-coaches did not in the old times dare attempt. In the early days of Pennant, and other chroniclers contemporary with him, the coaches inned every evening. None dared travel when the sun had set and darkness brooded over the land, for there were not only the highwaymen to be feared--and they still continued to increase--but the badness of the roads had constituted a danger even more dreaded. Now, however, roads--thanks to Post Office insistence--were greatly improved; and if the mails could go through the darkness, why not also the stages? Coincident with these things, great minds perceived that by changing horses every ten miles or so, and coachmen at intervals, a coach might, in the first place, be made to go much faster, and secondly, might put into twenty-four hours of continuous running what had formerly been the work of three days. It is obviously easy to go over a hundred miles in the twenty-four hours even if you only go five miles in every hour. These great truths once perceived and acted upon, the coaching world was revolutionised.