DRIVING FOR PLEASURE.
miles a day, for several consecutive days, over our indifferent roads with the same team.*
Driving, by the Duke of Beaufort, covers the subject quite fully, and Howlett, in his Driving Lessons, gives an excellent and practical illustration of what we are about to describe. Swales, in his book, Driving, as I have Found It, gives some of the best sketches extant, showing the positions of the hands, with both two and four reins. Captain C. Morley Knight, in his Hints on Driving, also gives some very good suggestions. It would be well for any amateur coachman to read all these books at length, as they will undoubtedly prove of service to him.
Assuming the would-be coachman to be familiar with the method of holding his reins and proficient in the use of his whip, let him walk quietly up to his off wheeler. He finds the hand pieces of the reins either looped over the pad terret or with the bight pushed under the tug strap. The whip is either in the whip bucket or is laid across the wheelers' backs, both of
* In 1884 the author drove his coach, with the same team, 776 miles in exactly a month ; starting from Long Island and driving up the Connecticut River Valley, over the white and Green Mountains, through the Berkshire Hills, and down the Hudson River to New York. The distance was taken from an odometer, of which a careful record was kept by one of the party. Hardly one month later the team competed in the National Horse Show and won a number of prizes. The coach loaded weighed something over five thousand pounds, there being eight in the party, besides three servants and the luggage.
