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Travis review
A free ride may not always be the best one to take. This is a story about a young man taking a ride to the train station via nepotism. That is, he is getting a free ride on the postal cart because his uncle is the postmaster. It is “against the regulations to take people with the mail,” and one would think of many reasons why there would be rules against it, but probably not that the occupant would be putting themselves into immediate, bodily danger. But that is the case as the ride is a mercilessly bumpy and jarring outing, rivaling Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. The nephew/student ends up with a bruised forehead and tweaked back on the chaotic ride through the forrest, but he wasn’t thrown out like the 11 year veteran postman. It’s hard to believe that this happens all the time. Perhaps the postman’s attitude caused extra uneasy in the horses. The student, chatty and open, is contrasted to a surly and quiet postman. Of course add the humiliation of the ride and the postman is nothing but a caldron of boiling anger. The driver is mostly non-existent except for when he calms the horses. Outside of the scene in the forrest, the story was not very engaging. I knew so little about the uptight postman that I didn’t care why he was upset.
Rating: 5