ly in his large hand, the stable and sure
intelligence beside me calmly chirruped, and then as calmly switched his
long whip at the distant rebel brute. How the switching and snapping
galled his proud neck! How his black back curved, and his small head
tossed! Still, he would not pull an ounce, but just pawed like a fairy
horse, or as if he were born to tread on clouds alone, or to herald in
the morning.

"He'll start by-'m-by,--he's a devil of a spirit in him, when he doos
start," remarked our Phoebus, composedly, giving, through the darkness,
the unerring switch every half minute.

What acted on the capricious thing at last,--whether the Inevitability
behind him, or the folly exhausting itself, nobody knows; but the
"beautiful disdain" left his black back and tossing mane in a moment,
and he buckled down to his work with an energy worthy of the cause, and
with a good-will that was an example to the other three.

"There! you see he can do well enough, 'f he's jest a mind to! nothin'
wantin' but the will! There's a pair on 'em," said the driver, "but I
won't never drive 'em together. Staples drove the pair last summer. He
says they'd run till they dropped down dead. I guess they would. He's a
putty critter enough, and well made, but dreadful ugly. Now, I like that
'ere wheeler!"--he pointed his whip towards the horse below my foot.
"She's kind,--that mare is; and she's fast enough, and handsome. Broad
back,--short legs,--goes like a duck!"

In such pleasant chat (and why not? for wasn't the driver a cousin of my
own?--a man of means,--owning his team,--and with more knowledge of his
district than most members of Congress have? Indeed, I believe he's in
Congress this minute!) we pulled up hill and tore down dale. Nobody
knows a hill by experience but New-Hampshire travellers. The Green
Mountains are full of comparatively gentle slopes, and verdure crowns
their highest and tallest tops; but the hills of New Hampshire are
Alpine in their steepness and barrenness, and the roads of old time made
by the Puritans took the Devil by the horns. There was no circuitous,
soothing, easy passage. The road ran straight over mountains and pitched
deep down ravines, the surveyors having evidently kept only in view the
shortest air-line between places.

Sometimes we chained the wheels, but not often. Oftenest we ran down a
steep place, and the impetus carried us up the opposite hill. At the
foot of a long hill, of a two-mile stretch