Various / 2008-09-16 00:00:00
"My heart leaps up" when I behold a stage coach--that snug, panel
painted, comfortable wheel-whirling "thing of life." O ye days of
juvenilian sensibilities--ye eye-feeding, heart-rising scenes of
remembered felicity!--how glorious was the coach at the school door! The
whip--Ajax _Mastigoferos_ never had such a powerful one as the modern
Jehu! The spokes of the wheels--they were handled with admiring fingers!
That Jupiter-like throne, the coach-box--who would not have risked his
neck to have been seated on it? When all was "right," how eloquent the
lip-music of coachee! how fine the introductory frisks of the horses'
tails, and the arching plunge of the fore-foot--no rainbow-curve ever
was so beauteous! "Oh, happy days! who would not be a boy again?" But
away with my puerilities. I intend the reader to take a doze in that
comfortable repository for the person--the inside of a coach.
With all the reckless simplicity of boyhood, I maintain that travelling
by coach is by no means the least of our sublunary pleasures. Man is a
_wheelable_ animal as well as walking one. Winter is the time for a nice
inside jaunt. What divine evaporations from the coachman's muzzle! What
a joyous creak in the down-flying steps!--and, oh! that comfortable
alertness with which we deposit ourselves in the padded corner, and fold
our coatflaps over our knees, glance at the frosty steam of the window;
and then, quite _a la Tityre_, repose our recumbent bodies at our ease!
Such moments as these are snatches of indefinable bliss.
Read more
Parts:
1
2
3