“Setting up” a fine carriage in the last century was quite different from purchasing a fine automobile today. Considerable knowledge was required as to style of harness, liveries, purpose, details and customs. The description of one of the most costly late 19th century stables here in the United States reads like a tale from the Arabian nights. The town coach barn of this owner contained a coach, a brougham, a hansom, a runabout and an opera wagon, but the carriage house at his country estate was awe-inspiring. It sheltered dozens of vehicles of every sort, and a corps of stablemen was employed to maintain these vehicles in first class condition. In 1905 this collection was broken up and auctioned off to the hundreds who came and went during the days of the sale. Newspaper accounts of the day said that they were bewildered by the display of the victorias, the park drags, the skeleton breaks, the two hundred sets of harness, the magnificent monogrammed blankets for the horses and all the rest of the accoutrements. [Illustration: SKETCHED FROM LIFE BY T. WORTH LITH CURRIER & IVES, N. Y. ENTERED ACCORDING TO ACT OF CONGRESS IN THE YEAR 1869 BY CURRIER & IVES IN THE CLERK’S OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT COURT OF THE U.S. FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK FASHIONABLE “TURN-OUTS” IN CENTRAL PARK. NEW YORK PUBLISHED BY CURRIER & IVES 152 NASSAU STREET] The “carriage parade” was a daily event in every major American city and New York’s vehicles thronged over the ten miles of fine carriage roads in and around Central Park. Every afternoon between the hours of four and five, fashionable society of New York “took the air.” East Drive from the Mall south to Fifth Avenue and 59th Street was lined with spectators, and in their polished carriages, attended by their immaculate servants, the élite drove back and forth, passing and re-passing each other. It is said that the first time they met each other, they bowed ceremoniously, the second time they smiled, and the third time they looked away. When warm weather came, society moved out of the city en masse, and their carriages went along too. The summer carriage parade at Newport, Rhode Island was reputed to be even finer and more glittering than the New York “promenade on wheels.” In the United States, it was not only the people of wealth and fashion who owned carriages, and herein lies one of the great differences in our attitude and that of the countries abroad. We developed the rockaway, surrey, buggy and buckboard; vehicles that could be produced inexpensively; vehicles that were light and practical with a stripped-down functional look, yet for all their air of fragility, possessed of great strength. We fashioned them so that a servant was not required either to drive them or to maintain them; we built them in such numbers and so well that the treatise on _Coachbuilding_ published in London in 1881 by J. W. Burgess noted: