only the waggoners and the sailors are usually known by that adjective. Rarely, indeed, is the sailor described in any other way. In a few instances he may be “Valiant,” but ninety times in every hundred he is “Jolly.” According to the second verse of the “Jolly Waggoner,” his cheerfulness was invincible:-- It is a cold and stormy night: I’m wetted to the skin, But I’ll bear it with contentment till I get me to my inn, And then I’ll sit a-drinking with the landlord and his kin. Sing wo! my lads, sing wo! Drive on, my lads, gee-ho! For who can live the life that we jolly waggoners do-o-o? He knew something of all kinds of weather, and met all kinds of men in his daily journeys, and thus early became something of a philosopher, looking forward for nothing beyond his nightly inn, in whose kitchen he was well known and esteemed, alike for his own qualities and the news and parcels he brought from the outer world on the other side of the distant hills. With a sack over his shoulders and peace in his mind, he could greet the rainy days with joke and song, or endure even the wintry horrors of December and January with equanimity; yet when spring was come and grass grew green and the bare, ruined boughs of the trees began to be clothed again with leaves, not even the old heathen Greeks and Romans in their Floralia celebrated the coming again of the sun with more heartiness. His horses and himself were decked with ribbons on May Day, his sweetheart had some longed-for present from the Great City, and not even the blackbird on the hawthorn spray sang a merrier tune, as he drove his team along their steady pace. It is not a little difficult to pronounce an opinion upon the fares which the poor folk paid by stage-waggon. Prices varied widely. On the Great North Road in 1780, between London and Edinburgh, the measure was, indeed, not by miles but by days; but as the journey took fourteen days, and the fare was a shilling a day, and the distance covered was 396 miles, we can figure it out at about twenty-eight miles a day at something less than a halfpenny a mile. Early stage-waggons to Cambridge, however, appear to have exacted three-halfpence a mile, and moved with incredible slowness, taking two and a half days to perform the fifty-one miles, and sleeping two nights upon the road. On the Bath Road the waggon-fare seems to have been something less than a penny a mile.