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The other room, where post-horse company used to wait while relays were getting ready down the yard, still held its ground, but was as airless as I conceive a hearse to be: insomuch that Mr.
"Indeed it is, my dear fellow. You do not know how to look at the bright side of things." "How, pray, are we to go on?" asked Blount. "That is the easiest thing in the world," replied Alcide. "Go and harness yourself to what remains of our cart; I will take the reins, and call you my little pigeon, like a true iemschik, and you will trot off like a real post-horse." "Mr.
But I am always very suspicious, when Ellesmere appears to be carried away by any enthusiasm, that it will break off suddenly, like the gallop of a post-horse. Dunsford. Well, what are we to have for our essay! Milverton. Despair. Ellesmere. I feel equal to anything just now, and so, if it must be read sometime or other, let us have it now. Milverton. You need not be afraid.
When I came to study out all this, and consider the duties and obligations imposed on me as a traveler going a journey of three or four hundred miles; that I was to be subject to contingencies and liabilities depending upon the elements both by land and sea; that serious responsibilities fell upon me if I held the reins of the post-horse, and probably heavy risks of life and limb if the post-boy held them; that the inn-keeper, station-holder, alderman, or two men chosen miscellaneously from the ranks of society, were to judge of damages that might be inflicted upon the horse; that I must register my name in a day-book, and enter formal complaints against the authorities on the way about every ten miles; that the tariff might rise and fall five hundred times during the journey, for aught I knew, according to the rise and fall of provisions or the pleasure of the Amtmand; that conspiracies might be entered into against me to make me pay for all the lame, halt, blind, and spavined horses in the country, and my liberty restrained in some desolate region of the mountains; that I could not speak a dozen words of the language, and had no other means of personal defense against imposition than a small pen-knife and the natural ferocity of my countenance when all these considerations occurred to me, I confess they made me hesitate a little before launching out from Lillehammer.
You must know, too, that Malambruno told me that, whenever fate provided the knight our deliverer, he himself would send him a steed far better and with less tricks than a post-horse; for he will be that same wooden horse on which the valiant Pierres carried off the fair Magalona; which said horse is guided by a peg he has in his forehead that serves for a bridle, and flies through the air with such rapidity that you would fancy the very devils were carrying him.
Now I hate to hear a person, especially if he be a traveller, complain that we do not get on so fast in France as we do in England; whereas we get on much faster, consideratis considerandis; thereby always meaning, that if you weigh their vehicles with the mountains of baggage which you lay both before and behind upon them and then consider their puny horses, with the very little they give them 'tis a wonder they get on at all: their suffering is most unchristian, and 'tis evident thereupon to me, that a French post-horse would not know what in the world to do, was it not for the two words...... and...... in which there is as much sustenance, as if you give him a peck of corn: now as these words cost nothing, I long from my soul to tell the reader what they are; but here is the question they must be told him plainly, and with the most distinct articulation, or it will answer no end and yet to do it in that plain way though their reverences may laugh at it in the bed-chamber full well I wot, they will abuse it in the parlour: for which cause, I have been volving and revolving in my fancy some time, but to no purpose, by what clean device or facette contrivance I might so modulate them, that whilst I satisfy that ear which the reader chuses to lend me I might not dissatisfy the other which he keeps to himself.
Yoke a Newmarket courser to a dung cart, and I'll lay my life on't he'll either caper or kick most confoundedly, or be as stupid and restive as an old battered post-horse. Among the many clubs of the time Boswell instituted a jovial society called the Soaping Club which met weekly in a tavern.
Then he told me that I must pack up my portmanteau that very afternoon, and start that night by post-horse for West Chester.
Thy chains were freedom, and thy toils repose, Could the poor post-horse tell thee all his woes; Show thee his bleeding shoulders, and unfold The dreadful anguish he endures for gold; Hired at each call of business, lust, or rage, That prompts the traveller on from stage to stage.
This is over and done with simply because the post-horse is no longer wanted, and we have to remember that no form of cruelty inflicted, whether for sport or profit or from some other motive, on the lower animals has ever died out of itself in the land.
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