He dreamed sweet dreams of colthood; visions of his mother, of Caesar, of Black Baby, came to him and he was content.
But, alas, this pleasant, peaceful life ended full soon, and, in 1816 he was sold to a man by the name of Langmaid, who drove the freight-stage from Windsor to Chelsea, a distance of nearly two hundred miles. Thus the brave old animal, at twenty-seven years of age, was ignominiously thrust into harness company with five other lazy, ill-bred brutes, who dawdled along the road with slack tugs and made the patient Morgan do most of the pulling.
For the first time in his long life the ambitious horse admitted a feeling of discouragement into his heart; he was ill-fed, never rubbed down, and life seemed utterly hopeless.[14]
That was the year men called “Eighteen-hundred-and-starved-to-death,” and throughout the entire summer there was not one warm, sunshiny day.
Growing wet with their intolerably toilsome exertions over the slippery, tumbling roads, with the wind howling and the trees bending low about them, the horses would become chilled to the bone, with often nothing but hemlock boughs to eat. They panted and strained as they climbed, and the lumbering stage, with its heavy load of freight, had to be hauled over the tops of the almost perpendicular hills and mountains, at the crack of a long, keen whip in the hands of a merciless driver; every moment they were in danger of crashing over an embankment. It took steady nerve to do this, and poor, proud Morgan, who had never before felt a whip, chafed under the treatment and the remarks of people who had known him in his prime.
He almost fretted himself to death, he was heartsick, and a leaden weariness of battling came over him; he was in a pitiable plight.
That year crops were all killed, famine threatened, and once more Vermont drank the cup of desolation to its dregs. Good church people, with their children starving, cursed their God.
On one occasion the stage passed the farm of a man driven to desperation by the conditions—no crops—no food. He did not hear the stage coming—the horses’ feet fell noiselessly on the soundless road, knee-deep—the heavy wheels half hidden—in mud. There he stood, his Bible in his hand, and in a loud voice he poured forth a torrent of threats “to burn the Book if his crops were killed by the threatening frost.”
Mother Nature had made her plans, and did not change them for such impious railings.
When the stage passed, a few days later, neighbors’ tongues buzzed with Diah Brewster’s blasphemy, for he had kept his word!