A crowd collected to see the fun. The owner swore that it was always the rule to pay in advance, and we replied that there was no rule without one exception.
He said he must take the money, as he could not trust his drivers, and we invited him to occupy the box till the end of the excursion, and then take his pay. The upshot of the matter: was that he finally told the drivers to go ahead, and they went. Dog River was reached in twenty minutes, and then the joke
was apparent. We would have been there and back in an hour or less had we paid in advance, and there would have been no such thing as redress.
We kept the carriages two hours and took a drive of a couple of miles on the Damascus road to a pretty grove of pines. Then we returned to town just inside of the stipulated time and handed over the pay to the drivers only when we were deposited at the door of the hotel.
Moral: Be cautious about paying a hackman in advance.
We are told and believe that the horse is a noble animal—why is it that nearly every one who associates with him is a scoundrel? A horse jockey is never held up as a pattern of honesty; the race track is the scene of much that is wicked, and as for hackmen, their rascality is the next thing to an axiom—a selfevident proposition.