at some was swallowed by the
sister who had been unwillingly roused from the sleep she had willingly
offered to forego overnight, collecting cloaks, baskets, and
travelling-rugs, and altogether looking so wakeful and ready that she
wellnigh drove her drowsy sister to desperation.

The preannounced torrents proved as swollen as were expected; so that
the passengers had to unpack themselves from the heaps of wrappings
stowed snugly round their feet and knees, and issue forth into the keen
morning air, armed with difficultly-put-up umbrellas, to traverse
certain wooden foot-bridges, in the midst of which they could not help
halting to watch the lightened diligence dragged splashingly through the
deep and rapid streams, expecting, at every lunge it made into the
water-dug gullies, to see it turn helplessly over on its side in the
very midst of them. Nevertheless, no such accident occurred; and the
four jogged on, along soaking, soppy, drenched roads, that seemed never
to have known dust or drought. At one saturated village, they saw a
dripping procession of people under crimson umbrellas, shouldering two
rude coffins of deal boards, which were borne to the door of a church
that stood by the wayside,--where the train waited in a kind of moist
dejection to be admitted, and to look dispiritedly after the passing
diligence. The alert gentleman heard from what the conductor gathered
from an old woman wrapped in a many-colored gaudy-patterned scarf of
chintz, which, wet through, covered her head and shoulders clingingly,
that this was the funeral of a poor peasant-man and his wife, who had
both died suddenly and both on the same day. The old woman held up her
brown, shrivelled hands, and gesticulated pityingly with them in the
pouring rain, as she mumbled her hurried tale of sorrow; while the
postilion involuntarily slackened pace, that her words might be heard
where he and the conductor sat.

The horses were suffered to creep on at their own snail pace, while the
influence of the funeral scene lasted; but soon the long lash was plied
vivaciously again, and we came to another torrent, more deep, more
rapid, more swollen than any previous one. Fortunately for us, a day or
two before there had been a postilion nearly drowned in attempting to
drive through this impassable ford; and still more fortunately for us,
this postilion chanced to have a relation who was a servant in the
household of Count Cavour, then prime-minister to King