service, from five or six hairy and half-civilized station-keepers and
hostlers who were nimbly unhitching our steeds and bringing the fresh
team out of the stables--for in the eyes of the stage-driver of that day,
station-keepers and hostlers were a sort of good enough low creatures,
useful in their place, and helping to make up a world, but not the kind
of beings which a person of distinction could afford to concern himself
with; while, on the contrary, in the eyes of the station-keeper and the
hostler, the stage-driver was a hero--a great and shining dignitary, the
world's favorite son, the envy of the people, the observed of the
nations. When they spoke to him they received his insolent silence
meekly, and as being the natural and proper conduct of so great a man;
when he opened his lips they all hung on his words with admiration (he
never honored a particular individual with a remark, but addressed it
with a broad generality to the horses, the stables, the surrounding
country and the human underlings); when he discharged a facetious
insulting personality at a hostler, that hostler was happy for the day;
when he uttered his one jest--old as the hills, coarse, profane, witless,
and inflicted on the same audience, in the same language, every time his
coach drove up there--the varlets roared, and slapped their thighs, and
swore it was the best thing they'd ever heard in all their lives. And
how they would fly around when he wanted a basin of water, a gourd of the
same, or a light for his pipe!--but they would instantly insult a
passenger if he so far forgot himself as to crave a favor at their hands.
They could do that sort of insolence as well as the driver they copied it
from--for, let it be borne in mind, the overland driver had but little
less contempt for his passengers than he had for his hostlers.

The hostlers and station-keepers treated the really powerful conductor of
the coach merely with the best of what was their idea of civility, but
the driver was the only being they bowed down to and worshipped. How