RIDING.
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WHAT a vast improvement has been made
upon the old methods and means of
travelling, even within the memory of
the youngest of us! Recall the old
staging system a moment to mind, when a day's ride was
agony in its anticipation, not to be dispelled by the stern
reality, over roads scarce redeemed from primeval roughness,
which the jolly tongue of the red-faced driver —
provided you were lucky enough to get on the box
with him — was hardly capable of enlivening. What
apprehension did timid insiders feel of threatening wreck
at the bottom of the steep hills they rattled down! How
fearful they would be of never reaching the top of the
next hill, from the miserable horses giving out that were
attached to the vehicle! How they trembled at the
danger of having their brains knocked out against the
roof of the low coach, in the rebound that anon jerked them
from their seats as the stage-wheel sunk into a cart-rut!
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For this latter alarm there was considerable cause, to
judge by a story told us once by one of the professors
of the whip. He was riding, he said, one day over the
way we were then travelling, in a terrible bad season of
the year, when the cart-wheels had cut the roads up into
hideous gullies, into which the wheels would plunge, to
the danger of all who chose to ride; and often the passengers
had to get out and lay their shoulders to the
work to assist the horses in their exertions to extricate
the vehicle from the mud. The day he spoke of, however,
he had but one passenger, — an elderly gentleman,
wearing a wig, — and, feeling his responsibility lessened by
his diminished fare, he took less heed as to where he went,
and dashed along over the road, whistling from absence
of care, entirely regardless of horses or passenger, determined
to achieve the distance to the next stopping-place
in a time mentally allotted for its performance. It was one
of the old-fashioned low-roofed coaches, one of the oldest of
its class. A sudden cry from a child who was passing
caused him to look round, and there to his horror he
saw the old gentleman's bald head glistening in the sun's
rays like a mammoth mushroom, his eyes glaring on him
wildly, and his mouth vainly endeavoring to articulate.
It was but an instant before he was extricated from his
perilous situation. In one of the sudden lurches of the
road he had been forced up through the canvass roof,
and this closing around his neck held him there, incapable
of helping himself, and he had ridden many miles in
this manner before he was discovered.
“That story 's just as true, now, as I tell it to you,”
said the driver.
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“Don't doubt it,” we replied; “but what became of
the hat and wig?”
“I can't say anything about the hat, but I 'm very
much mistaken if I did n't see that old wig, for three
seasons, used as a genteel residence for a family of crows
down the road here.”
A very singular story, we thought, and think so
still.
Shillaber, B. P. (Benjamin Penhallow), 1814-1890 [1854], Life and sayings of Mrs. Partington and others of the family. (J. C. Derby, New York) [word count] [eaf677T].
