Often it became amusing to see how easy a good-hearted driver who loved his team, as many drivers did, could favor it by letting the horses walk up each little ascent, but when in sight of the change would blow the horn and crack the whip, and go in flying, with a mark “behind time” for the next driver and relay to make up. But the “make up” seldom came, and it was nothing unusual in a distance of two hundred miles to find the coaches fifteen to twenty hours behind the schedule time. There were no improved roads north of Columbus for nearly fifty years, and during the wet season, or thawing of the frozen road-bed, staging became slow and laborious. If not mixed with pleasure, it was the only means of inland intercourse of a public character the inhabitants could look to. Charles Dickens, on his way from Columbus, Ohio, to Buffalo, N. Y., _via_ Sandusky City, in 1842, accurately describes the roughness of traveling by stage-coach and the jolting of the corduroy roads over bogs and swamps, and says: “At length, between ten and eleven o’clock at night, a few feeble lights appeared in the distance, and Upper Sandusky, an Indian village, where we were to stay till morning, lay before us. They were gone to bed at the log inn, which was the only house of entertainment in the place, but soon answered our knocking, and got some tea for us in a sort of kitchen or common room, tapestried with old newspapers pasted against the wall. “The bed-chamber to which my wife and I were shown was a large, low, ghostly room, with a quantity of withered branches on the hearth, and two doors without any fastening, opposite to each other, both opening upon the black night and wild country, and so contrived that one of them always blew the other open, a novelty in domestic architecture which I do not remember to have seen before, and which I was somewhat disconcerted to have forced on my attention after getting into bed, as I had a considerable sum in gold for our traveling expenses in my dressing case. Some of the luggage, however, piled against the panels, soon settled this difficulty, and my sleep would not have been very much affected that night, I believe, though it had failed to do so. “My Boston friend climbed up to bed somewhere in the roof, where another guest was already snoring hugely. But being bitten beyond his power of endurance, he turned out again, and fled for shelter to the coach, which was airing itself in front of the house. This was not a very politic step as it turned out, for the pigs scenting him, and looking upon the coach as a kind of pie with some manner of meat inside, grunted around it so hideously that he was afraid to come out again, and lay there shivering till morning. Nor was it possible to warm him, when he did come out, by means of a glass of brandy, for in Indian villages the legislature, with a very good and wise intention, forbids the sale of spirits by tavern-keepers.”