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Not that their loads are light; for the smallest of them has at least six people inside, four in front, four or five more hanging behind, and two or three more, in a net or bag below the axle-tree, where they lie half-suffocated with mud and dust.
XX. Such a Deity may properly be called happy; but yours is a most laborious God. For let us suppose the world a Deity what can be a more uneasy state than, without the least cessation, to be whirled about the axle-tree of heaven with a surprising celerity? But nothing can be happy that is not at ease.
Well, the truth is, we were all afraid; and if the pole of the stage had not been lying close to the threshold, I don't believe anything on earth would have induced us to cross it. We seized hold of the pole-straps and succeeded with great trouble in dragging the coach out. The two fore wheels had rusted to the axle-tree, and refused to revolve. It was the merest skeleton of a coach.
Ten days after this event, he left the house for the first time, in his repaired cabriolet, when, as he drove down the rue de Bourgogne and was close to the sewer opposite to the Chamber of Deputies, the axle-tree broke in two, and the baron was driving so rapidly that the breakage would have caused the two wheels to come together with force enough to break his head, had it not been for the resistance of the leather hood.
The backbone and axle-tree are roughly hewn sticks of wood, ironed equally rough at the village blacksmith's; and as, for a twenty-kreuzer piece, the rider mounts and wobbles all over the sidewalk for a short distance, the spectacle would make a stoic roar with laughter, and the good people of the Lower Danubian provinces are anything but stoical.
They used a frame of green wood, of a square form, in the centre of which was an axle-tree. In some places three times three persons, in others three times nine, were required for turning round by turns the axle-tree or wimble.
The oxen, in drawing it, were not attached, as with us, to the centre of the forward axle-tree, but to the ends of the axle-trees, which projected beyond the wheels on each side. There were eleven oxen on each side drawing upon the axle-trees. There were, of course, many drivers.
To be accurate and methodical, each wagon has four wheels, and each wheel is roughly put together of rough wood, and then roughly bound up in an iron band about four inches wide, and thick in proportion. Logs of wood, skillfully hewed with broad-axes, answer for the axle-tree; and as they don't weigh over half a ton each, they are sometimes braced in the middle to keep them from breaking.
Besides, the house is altogether inaccessible, except at low water, and even then the carriage must cross the harbour, the wheels up to the axle-tree in mud: nay, the tide rushes in so fast, that unless you seize the time to a minute, you will be in danger of perishing.
Government at Breslau has ordered such Protest, on the part of the Frontier populations and Official persons: and this is all that comes of it. During these hours, it chanced that the big Bell of Crossen dropped from its steeple, fulness of time, or entire rottenness of axle-tree, being at last completed, at this fateful moment. Perhaps an ominous thing?
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