Still gathering the reins lightly 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, the driver generally stopped, to indicate the propriety of the male passengers, at least, ascending the hill on foot.  And often the whole stage-load gladly availed itself of the permission.  It was handy for the owners of bandboxes, to pick them up from the rocky road, as they tumbled off now and then; and the four beasts, like those in Revelation, said “Amen” to the kindly impulse of humanity that lightened their load, and left them to scramble comfortably from one side to the other of the still ascending path.  When they did get to the top of some of those Walpole hills, would they could have taken in the living glory and beauty of the far-reaching and most magnificent landscape!