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Updated: June 13, 2025
And like the one-hoss shay about to collapse, the whole fabric of the resuscitated plant, leaking at a score of joints, creaking, whistling, shaking, voicing a hundred agonized mechanic woes, revived in a grotesque, absurd and shocking imitation of its one-time beauty and power. He sat down, exhausted, on the floor. In his hand the lamp trembled.
"There now, my lady," he said triumphantly when they were on the platform. "I suppose you thought you were comin' to Rubeville. That don't look so hay-seedy? Eh?" He pointed to a dusty automobile whose driver, a boy of eighteen or twenty, with a torn hat, eyed her with dull curiosity. "I suppose you expected a one-hoss shay. No, indeedy. You've come to all the comforts of home, little girl."
We were not made all at once, nor do we go to pieces all at once, like the "one-hoss shay." This is largely because we are not all of the same age, clear through. Some parts of us are older than other parts. We have always felt a difficulty, not to say a delicacy, in determining the age of a given member of the human species especially of the gentler sex. Now we know the reason of it.
But here, in the old doctor's "one-hoss shay," and with her round straw hat and chintz wrapper on, she was finding out what a rapturously different thing it is to go out into the bountiful morning, and identify oneself therewith.
The Iatan ran for years after she tied up at Louisville that summer morning, and then perhaps she was blown up or burned up; perchance some cruel sawyer transfixed her; perchance she was sunk by ice, or maybe she was robbed of her engines and did duty as barge, or, what is more probable, she wore out like the one-hoss shay, and just tumbled to pieces simultaneously.
When the conductor, in a huge straw hat and rough suit, sans collar or cravat, comes to collect tickets, the satirical one asks, "Will he punch them with his penknife, or clip them with a pair of old scissors?" We have "Heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay, That was built in such a logical way It ran a hundred years to a day,"
But the old man wouldn't hear of us walking that three miles. So about eight o'clock he hitched up a mule to a one-hoss wagon, and we jogged along. They was a yaller moon sneaking up over the edge of the world when we started. It was so low down in the sky yet that it threw long shadders on the road, and they was thick and black ones, too.
You didn't do it for any mean or selfish reason, that I know. There ain't a selfish bone in your body, Roscoe. I've lived along with you all these years and I know. Nobody that was mean or selfish would give up their chances in life and stay here in this one-hoss town because his ma was sick and had took a notion that she couldn't bear to part with him.
Coming up from the rear, I sat in the One-Hoss Shay behind Crazy Weed, the blind and locoed mare, with the water cans rattling in the back end of the buggy. I too wore an old straw hat, big as a ten-gallon sombrero, pushed back on my head to protect my sunburnt neck, and an old rag of a dress hanging loose on my small body, which was becoming thinner.
The name itself is slightly humorous, but it is a perfect work of art, and the line, "Soft and low is a maiden's 'Yes," has the beautiful hush of a sanctuary in it. A finer verse could not be written. Also for a comic piece nothing equal to "The Wonderful One-hoss Shay" has appeared since Burns's "Tam O'Shanter."
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