"Hur-rah, hurrah," hiccuped Ben, as he strove to raise his head from the pillow. "Hurrah, you beautiful—beauti—piece of ebony—hurrah I say—" down dropped his head. "Wha-wats the odds so as you're happy!"
THE POSTILION.
"Wo-ho-ho-ho-up—wo-ho!"—Sweet public, you are now in the yard of the Crown and Cauliflower Hotel, famous for posting, roasting, and accommodating the lieges with very lean bills of fare, and very fat bills of figures;—and you have listened to the lover-like tones, half-soliciting, half-imperative, with which our postboy brought his horses at once to a halt, at the hall-door of the Crown and Cauliflower. There he stands at your chaise-door, hand to hat, and whip couchant, soliciting your favourable notice. There stands the postboy, an important individual of the great family of the riders. He is much given to a white silk hat, with the silk worn off the rim in front, a white neckerchief, a white vest, a canary jacket, a small plaited shirt, and white corded unfit-for-finical-ladies-to-conceive-the-proper-ogatives of. The postboy is a jumble of contradictions; he is always rising in the world, yet he is as constantly finding his level; he has had more ups and downs than any other being; he is, at least, fifty-seven, but he has not yet arrived at manhood; should he complete the century, he will be as far off from it then as he is now; he is always a postboy; a boy post dated; he never reaches man's estate; he never knows its declension; he never sinks into second childishness; he lives and dies a postboy. We have heard of one, two, or three instances "down the road," where he saved one or two thousand pounds, and became a landlord. We think they are apocryphal. Perhaps they occurred in the days of the highwaymen, by whom postboys have been known to profit. But whenever they occurred, or however, they are exceptions in the great chapter of postboys, proving that the will of fate has given to the postboy
"A local habitation and a name"—
if, indeed, there can be said to be anything local about his changing and yet monotonous existence—else he had walked about the world an embodied nonentity. He is a totally different being to the cantering gemini, the letter postboy and his horse; nor does he ever become "a postman." Like Tom Moody, he radiates
"Through a country well known to him fifty miles round,"
yet little knoweth he besides the change-houses, and they, in his imagination, stand out in glorious array:—the Pig and Lapstone, the Three Leathern Corkscrews, the Manuscript and Hatchet, the Stork and Ruffles, the Waggon and Shirtpin, the Syllabub and Pump, all of which, in motley succession, dance before his dozing eyes as so many havens from his peril;—the sole green spots that ornament the desert of his life.
The postilion is a veritable centaur—a human quadruped partaking of the two natures, the stable and the bed and bolster, "three-pennorth o' brandy," and the nose-bag. He is a poet, superior to that genuine pastoral, the haymaker, if familiarity with Apollo (and if Apollo be the sun) constitutes a poet. The sickle-wielder of Autumn burns not with such fervid inspiration. Look on his countenance—"that index to the soul"—and imagine how full of fire that soul must be, when the proverbial brevity of an index contains so much—"to overflowing full." His genus stands out like a finger-post before him, introducing him to every circle. His soul is concentrated in the Mews. Talk of Shakspere and Owen Glendower, they never carried such lights before them; even Bardolph himself possessed not such a nasal flambeau. No! his is an inspired nose, and his nose knows it! And it loveth not, neither doth it abide, the familiarities of the aqueous element, but hisses in its ablutions, as a stable-boy hisses when he is cleaning a horse, thereby publishing its heat and its nosology. Again, mark you his freckles—whoever saw such in the face of beauty? He is a character "alone in his glory," so far as his outward indications go. Let us gauge the calibre of his understanding. We were in the tap of the Sun and Cabbage-stump when he called to "wet his whistle." A "boy" was there before him from the Hand and Placquet, drinking with "a return," said return being a runaway apprentice, and our postboy stopped with his in the shape of a clandestine marriage. Upon meeting, the following colloquy took place:—
"Well, Tom, how goes it at the Placquet, eh? I see ye up the road pretty often lately. I 'spose the old man an' her don't agree no better? Ah! he shouldn't a married her."