230 ANNALS OF THE ROAD. 



have to attribute an accident, which occurred to myself, 

 and therefore my authority is good. I purchased a 

 horse which had never been in harness before, and put 

 him at wheel in a tandem. He went fourteen miles as 

 quietly as if he had run as many years in the mail, when 

 all of a sudden without the least provocation — without a 

 whip, rein, or even a fly touching him — he began to mill, 

 and, to use a coachman's phrase, ' a sack was wanting 

 to bring home the gig.' With the assistance of the reins 

 I escaped myself, but my servant was a good deal 

 hurt. On examining the harness, we found that the pad 

 pressed on his withers, and having some hills to go 

 down, the pressure was more than he could bear, so he 

 merely tried to relieve himself, for he was by no means a 

 vicious horse. 



There is another precaution in a gig, of which I have 

 more than once found the good effects ; and that is never 

 to sit with the feet under the body, but always to have 

 one, if not both, out before it A few years back I was 

 trying to keep pace with a friend of mine, who was better 

 horsed than myself, on the return from a fishing party 

 ■ — the pipes being rather queer — when the horse I was 

 driving choked in his collar, at the top of a hill, and fell 

 as if he were shot. I had a passenger by the side of me, 

 who was sitting with his feet under his belly, and conse- 

 quently was thrown, with much violence, into the road. 

 On my asking him if he were hurt, he said he could not 

 tell, but ' what the d — 1 ' said he, 'came of you ?'- -won- 

 dering, of course, that I had not shared the same fate 

 with himself. I told him if he had been sitting as I was 



