Set off by coach, long before day-light. There is something very gratifying when once you _are up_, in finding yourself up before the sun; you can repeat to yourself, "How doth the little busy bee," with such satisfaction. Some few stars still twinkled in the sky, winking like the eyelids of tired sentinels, but soon they were relieved, one after another, by the light of morning.
It was still dark when we started, and off we went, up hill and down hill--short steep _pitches_, as they term them here--at a furious rate. There was no level ground; it was all undulating, and very trying to the springs. But an American driver stops at nothing; he will flog away with six horses in hand; and it is wonderful how few accidents happen: but it is very fatiguing, and one hundred miles of American travelling by stage, is equal to four hundred in England.
There is much amusement to be extracted from the drivers of these stages, if you will take your seat with them on the front, which few Americans do, as they prefer the inside. One of the drivers, soon after we had changed our team, called out to the off-leader, as he flanked her with his whip. "Go along, you _no-tongued_ crittur!"
"Well, I reckon she has no tongue, having bitten it off herself, I was going to say--but it wasn't exactly that, neither."
"Well now, the fact is, that she is awful ugly," (ill-tempered); "she bites like a badger, and kicks up as high as the church-steeple. She's an almighty crittur to handle. I was trying to hitch her under-jaw like, with the halter, but she worretted so, that I could only hitch her tongue: she ran back, the end of the halter was fast to the ring, and so she left her tongue in the hitch--that's a _fact_!"
"I wonder it did not kill her; didn't she bleed very much? How does she contrive to eat her corn?"
"Well, now, she bled pretty considerable--but not to speak off. I did keep her _one day_ in the stable, because I thought she might feel _queer_; since that she has worked in the team every day; and she'll eat her peck of corn with any horse in the stable. But her tongue is out, that's certain--so _she'll tell no more lies_!"
Not the least doubting my friend's veracity I, nevertheless, took an opportunity, when we changed, of ascertaining the fact; and her tongue was _half_ of it out, that _is_ the fact.