ONE-HORSE SHAY

also called cheer (for chair), or whisky (because its light weight enabled it to whisk about) open two-wheeled vehicle that was the American adaptation of the French chaise. Its chairlike body, seating the passengers on one seat above the axle, was hung by leather braces from a pair of square wooden springs attached to the shafts. Early one-horse shays had fixed standing tops, later ones folding tops. Oliver Wendell Holmes's poem The Deacon's Masterpiece, a satire on Calvinism, paints a whimsical picture of a one-hoss shay that was so perfectly built that it lasted for 100 years and then fell apart all at once.