Protected by such a man and such a piece of armament, one gray Friday morning in the edge of winter, Mrs. Fanny Tobin was traveling from Sanscrit Pond to North Kilby.  She was an elderly and feeble-looking woman, but with a shrewd twinkle in her eyes, and she felt very anxious about her numerous pieces of baggage and her own personal safety.  She was enveloped in many shawls and smaller wrappings, but they were not securely fastened, and kept getting undone and flying loose, so that the bitter December cold seemed to be picking a lock now and then, and creeping in to steal away the little warmth she had.  Mr. Briley was cold, too, and could only cheer himself by remembering the valor of those pony-express drivers of the pre-railroad days, who had to cross the Rocky Mountains on the great California route.  He spoke at length of their perils to the suffering passenger, who felt none the warmer, and at last gave a groan of weariness.

“How fur did you say ’t was now?”

“I do’ know’s I said, Mis’ Tobin,” answered the driver, with a frosty laugh.  “You see them big pines, and the side of a barn just this way, with them yellow circus bills?  That’s my three-mile mark.”

“Be we got four more to make?  Oh, my laws!” mourned Mrs. Tobin.  “Urge the beast, can’t ye, Jeff’son?  I ain’t used to bein’ out in such bleak weather.  Seems if I couldn’t git my breath.  I’m all pinched up and wigglin’ with shivers now.  ‘T ain’t no use lettin’ the hoss go step-a-ty-step, this fashion.”

“Landy me!” exclaimed the affronted driver.  “I don’t see why folks expects me to race with the cars.  Everybody that gits in wants me to run the hoss to death on the road.  I make a good everage o’ time, and that’s all I can do.  Ef you was to go back an’ forth every day but Sabbath fur eighteen years, you’d want to ease it all you could, and let those thrash the spokes out o’ their wheels that wanted to.  North Kilby, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; Sanscrit Pond, Tuesdays, Thu’sdays, an’ Saturdays.  Me an’ the beast’s done it eighteen years together, and the creatur’ warn’t, so to say, young when we begun it, nor I neither.  I re’lly didn’t know’s she’d hold out till this time.  There, git up, will ye, old mar’!” as the beast of burden stopped short in the road.

There was a story that Jefferson gave this faithful creature a rest three times a mile, and took four hours for the journey by himself, and longer whenever he had a passenger.  But in pleasant weather the road was delightful, and full of people who drove their own conveyances, and liked to stop and talk.  There were not many farms, and the third growth of white pines made a pleasant shade, though Jefferson liked to say that when he began to carry the mail his way lay through an open country of stumps and sparse underbrush, where the white pines nowadays completely arched the road.

They had passed the barn with circus posters, and felt colder than ever when they caught sight of the weather-beaten acrobats in their tights.