Young coachmen, in descending a hill, should take care that their leaders do not draw on the end of the pole, which many free ones do when they find the coach coming quickly after them; for this not only increases the pressure of the coach on the wheelers, but, should either of them stumble, it must assist in bringing him down. The following good and characteristic directions were given by a very experienced coachman, to a gentleman who undertook to take his coach a journey for him, but who, although he knew the road well, had never driven on it before. “That middle twelve miles of ground,” said he, “is a punisher, and you must mind what you are at with this load. You have two hills to go down, and three to go up, in the first seven miles. Don’t stop to put the chain on, as they’ll hold well, and the tackle is good; and don’t let them walk up the hills, for they are bad hands at that--you will lose a horse’s draught by it, and perhaps get hung up on one of them. You must take fifty minutes to do the first seven miles, and good work too. When you get at the top of the last hill, get down and put your near leader to the cheek, and they’ll toddle you over the last five miles in half an hour, with all the pleasure alive.” The following observations on this subject from the number of the _Quarterly Review_ already quoted, are too interesting to be omitted here. “Many years have elapsed,” he says, “since I first observed that, somehow or other, the horses on the continent manage to pull a heavy carriage up a steep hill, or even along a dead level, with greater ease to themselves than our English horses. If any unprejudiced person would only attentively remark with what little apparent fatigue three small ill-conditioned horses will draw, not only his own carriage, but very often that huge over-grown vehicle the French diligence, or the German eilwagen, I think he would agree with me; but the whole equipment is so unsightly--the rope harness is so rude--the horses without blinkers look so wild--there is so much bluster with the postilion--that, far from paying any compliment to the turn-out, one is very much disposed at once to condemn the whole thing, and, not caring a straw whether such horses be fatigued or not, to make no other remark than that in England one would have travelled at nearly twice the rate with one-tenth of the noise. But neither the rate nor the noise is the point--our superiority in the former, and our inferiority in the latter, cannot be doubted. The thing to account for is, how such small, weak horses do actually manage to draw a heavy carriage up hill with so much ease to themselves. Now, in English, French, and German harness, there exists, as it were, three degrees of comparison as to the manner in which the head of the horse is treated; for, in England, it is elevated, or borne up, by what we call the bearing-rein,--in France it is left as Nature placed it (there being to common French harness no