Jone picked out a good man, who looked as if he was well broken and not afraid of locomotives and able to do good work in single harness.  When I got Jone in the bath-chair, with the buggy-top down, and his pipe lighted, and his hat cocked on one side a little, so as to look as if he was doing the whole thing for a lark, I called another chair, not caring what sort of one it was, and then we told the men to pull us around for a couple of hours, leaving it to them to take us to agreeable spots, which they said they would do.

After we got started Jone seemed to like it very well, and we went pretty much all over the town, sometimes stopping to look in at the shop windows, for the sidewalks are so narrow that it is no trouble to see the things from the street.  Then the men took us a little way out of the town to a place where there was a good view for us, and a bench where they could go and sit down and rest.  I expect all the chair men that work by the hour manage to get to this place with a view as soon as they can.

After they had had a good rest we started off to go home by a different route.  Jone’s man was a good strong fellow and always took the lead, but my puller was a different kind of a steed, and sometimes I was left pretty far behind.  I had not paid much attention to the man at first, only noticing that he was mighty slow; but going back a good deal of the way was uphill, and then all his imperfections came out plain, and I couldn’t help studying him.  If he had been a horse I should have said he was spavined and foundered, with split frogs and tonsilitis; but as he was a man, it struck me that he must have had several different kinds of rheumatism and been sent to Buxton to have them cured, but not taking the baths properly, or drinking the water at times when he ought not to have done it, his rheumatisms had all run together and had become fixed and immovable.  How such a creaky person came to be a bath-chair man I could not think, but it may be that he wanted to stay in Buxton for the sake of the loose gas which could be had for nothing, and that bath-chairing was all he could get to do.

I pitied the poor old fellow, who, if he had been a horse, would have been no more than fourteen hands high, and as he went puffing along, tugging and grunting as if I was a load of coal, I felt as if I couldn’t stand it another minute, and I called out to him to stop.  It did seem as if he would drop before he got me back to the hotel, and I bounced out in no time, and then I walked in front of him and turned around and looked at him.  If it is possible for a human hack-horse to have spavins in two joints in each leg, that man had them; and he looked as if he couldn’t remember what it was to have a good feed.

He seemed glad to rest, but didn’t say anything, standing and looking straight ahead of him like an old horse that has been stopped to let him blow.  He did look so dreadful feeble that I thought it would be a mercy to take him to some member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and have him chloroformed.  “Look here,” said I, “you are not fit to walk.  Get into that bath-chair, and I’ll pull you back to your stand.”