“Now all ye jolly wagoners, who have got good wives,
Go home to your farms, and there spend your lives.
When your corn is all cribbed, and your small grain is good,
You’ll have nothing to do but curse the railroad.”
[CHAPTER XXI.]
Stage Drivers, Stage Lines and Stage Coaches—The Postilion—Changing Horses—He comes, the Herald of a Noisy World—Pioneer Proprietors—Peter Burdine and his Little Rhyme—Anecdote of Thomas Corwin—Johny Ritter—Daniel Brown, his sad Ending—Soldier Drivers—Redding Bunting—Joseph and William Woolley—Andrew J. Wable—James Burr.
“My uncle rested his head upon his hands and thought of the busy bustling people who had rattled about, years before, in the old coaches, and were now as silent and changed; he thought of the numbers of people to whom once, those crazy, mouldering vehicles had borne, night after night, for many years, and through all weathers, the anxiously expected intelligence, the eagerly looked for remittance, the promised assurances of health and safety, the sudden announcement of sickness and death. The merchant, the lover, the wife, the widow, the mother, the school boy, the very child who tottered to the door at the postman’s knock—how had they all looked forward to the arrival of the old coach! And where were they all now?”—Charles Dickens.