“Now go and fetch your own tools!” I cried, shaking off the yoke of servitude.  “I won’t be your stable-boy any longer!”

Then, perforce, he gathered up the crockery, marched off in disgrace, and came back with a molasses-hogshead, or a wash-tub, or some such overgrown mastodon, to turn his sixpenny-worth of oats into.

Having fed our mettlesome steed, the next thing was to water him.  The Anakim remembered to have seen a pump with a trough somewhere, and they proposed to reconnoitre while we should “wait by the wagon” their return.  No, I said we would drive on to the pump, while they walked.

“You drive!” ejaculated Halicarnassus, contemptuously.

Now I do not, as a general thing, have an overweening respect for female teamsters.  There is but one woman in the world to whose hands I confide the reins and my bones with entire equanimity; and she says, that, when she is driving, she dreads of all things to meet a driving woman.  If a man said this, it might be set down to prejudice.  I don’t make any account of Halicarnassus’s assertion, that, if two women walking in the road on a muddy day meet a carriage, they never keep together, but invariably one runs to the right and one to the left, so that the driver cannot favor them at all, but has to crowd between them, and drive both into the mud.  That is palpably interested false witness.  He thinks it is fine fun to push women into the mud, and frames such flimsy excuses.  But as a woman’s thoughts about women, this woman’s utterances are deserving of attention; and she says that women are not to be depended upon.  She is never sure that they will not turn out on the wrong side.  They are nervous; they are timid; they are unreasoning; they are reckless.  They will give a horse a disconnected, an utterly inconsequent “cut,” making him spring, to the jeopardy of their own and others’ safety.  They are not concentrative, and they are not infallibly courteous, as men are.  I remember I was driving with her once between Newburyport and Boston.  It was getting late, and we were very desirous to reach our destination before nightfall.  Ahead of us a woman and a girl were jogging along in a country-wagon.  As we wished to go much faster than they, we turned aside to pass them; but just as we were well abreast, the woman started up her horse, and he skimmed over the ground like a bird.  We laughed, and followed well content.  But after he had gone perhaps an eighth of a mile, his speed slackened down to the former jog-trot.  Three times we attempted to pass before we really comprehended the fact that that infamous woman was deliberately detaining and annoying us.  The third time, when we had so nearly passed them that our horse was turning into the road again, she struck hers up so suddenly and unexpectedly that her wheels almost grazed ours.  Of course, understanding her game, we ceased the attempt, having no taste for horse-racing; and nearly all the way from Newburyport to Rowley, she kept up that brigandry,