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Updated: June 4, 2025
This poor girl and I were easy in our minds, in a state of entire resignation, though sure of dying if we passed the night there, and seeing no likelihood of anyone coming to our succor. At length some waggoners came up, who with difficulty drew us through the snow.
Matthew Moon, Joseph Poorgrass, and other carters and waggoners followed at his heels, with great lanterns dangling from their hands, which showed that they had just come from the cart-horse stables, where they had been busily engaged since four o'clock that morning. "And how is she getting on without a baily?" the maltster inquired.
He committed a vast number of robberies in a very short space, chiefly upon the waggoners in the Oxford Road, and sometimes, as if there were not crime enough in barely robbing them, he added to it by the cruel manner in which he treated them.
In one quarter, aides-de-camp, the bearers of urgent orders, vainly sought to force a passage; the soldiers were deaf to their remonstrances, and even to their orders: hence arose quarrels and outcries; the noise of which, united with the beating of drums, the oaths of the waggoners, the rumbling of the baggage-carts and cannon, the commands of the officers, and, finally, with the tumult of the regular contests which took place in the houses, the entrances of which, while one party attempted to force, others, already established there, prepared to defend.
The sleeping waggoners, wrapped in woollen cloaks, striped black and grey, and grasping the reins slackly in their closed hands, were stretched at full length on their stomachs atop of the piles of vegetables.
Instead, however, of animated co-operation, Washington was encountered by difficulties at every step. The waggons in question had to be impressed, and the waggoners compelled by force to assist. "No orders," writes he, "are obeyed, but such as a party of soldiers or my own drawn sword enforces.
Through the open doors from the kitchen in the yard behind the house came the strumming of a banjo, then Joab's deep bass: "Go down, go down, Moses, Tell Pharaoh let us go! Go down, go down, Moses, King Pharaoh, let us go!" There was a wave of honeysuckle, too faint and deadly sweet. A party of men, boatmen or waggoners, went by, and as they passed, broke into rough laughter.
With well-nursed bullocks, and a full complement of them the "Macs" had twenty-two per waggon for their dry stages a "thirty-five-mile dry" can be "rushed," the waggoners getting under way by three o'clock one afternoon, travelling all night with a spell or two for the bullocks by the way, and "punching" them into water within twenty-four hours.
Among these, carters and waggoners were distinguished by having a piece of whip-cord twisted round their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of woven straw; shepherds held their sheep-crooks in their hands; and thus the situation required was known to the hirers at a glance.
Care should be taken, in properly forming a road at first, otherwise you may botch it for a whole century, and at the end of that long period, it will be only a botch itself. A wide road will put the innocent traveller out of fear of the waggoners; not the most civilized of the human race.
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