Word: coachman
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...second level, Journey of the Fifth Horse is a parable about mankind. Chulkaturin, reading from his diary, tells the tale of the titular fifth horse, harnessed for some mysterious reason to a coach which already boasts a full complement of four horses. The coachman, who has shackled the fifth horse so clumsily as to make it chafe and bleed, explains that the animal has no purpose in life but to run, senselessly and painfully. Chulkaturin thinks of himself in terms of this story, for he and the fifth horse are both defined by an utterly characterless superfluity...
...book's most haunting pages. The bride of the second son of the first Baron Leconfield, for instance, undertook to photograph "all the dear servants at Petworth, 1860, when I came there." They include the butler, the underbutler, the park keeper, the keeper of the stallions, the coachman, the housekeeper. Lord Leconfield's valet, Lady Leconfield's maid, the French cook, the first groom of the chambers, and so on. Big houses often had as many as 50 people working downstairs. Yet strange as it may appear to the modern eye, the servants have the same look...
...consisted of his valet. The army of advancemen who set up the situation for Ford wherever he goes, where were they? Tavern keepers were amazed when a carriage turned unheralded into their dooryard and out stepped a tall man who proved to be the President of the U.S. The coachman would then investigate the stables, the President the rooms. If both proved too dirty for beast and man, the President would set out again, once in the middle of a torrential rainstorm although he did not know where on the deserted road he would find another tavern. He was puzzled...
...private letter writer may take some small consolation, however, in considering the postal rates of 1792, when it cost an uninflated 22? to have a coachman carry a one-page folded message a distance of 450 miles. The once flourishing tradition of personal correspondence has faded in the U.S. For years, Americans have tended to favor the more direct communion of telephone wires. Given the condition of telephone service in some parts of the country, however, it may be safe to predict a small renaissance of letter writing in America, even at the higher prices. Of course, if the postal...
...Glass Mountain. What goes on in Barthelme's surrealistic, mad-dance little world? In the first place, it is peopled with the oddest, the most chillingly funny characters: Horace, a gourmet-policeman, whose pièce de résistance is Rock Cornish hen; Lars Bang, a coachman out of a period print who hits and runs like a Mafia mobster; and there is even the Phantom of the Opera's Friend...