kept coming and going, and baiting and gaping at each other, as though a
fair were due, and they were gathering to it from all England. No,
nowhere in the world is travel so great a pleasure as in that country.
But unhappily our one need was to be secret; and all this rapid and
animated picture of the road swept quite apart from us, as we rumbled up
hill and down dale, under hedge and over stone, among circuitous byways.
Only twice did I receive, as it were, a whiff of the highway. The first
reached my ears alone. I might have been anywhere. I only knew I was
walking in the dark night and among ruts, when I heard very far off,
over the silent country that surrounded us, the guard's horn wailing
its signal to the next post-house for a change of horses. It was like
the voice of the day heard in darkness, a voice of the world heard in
prison, the note of a cock crowing in the mid-seas--in short, I cannot
tell you what it was like, you will have to fancy for yourself--but I
could have wept to hear it. Once we were belated: the cattle could
hardly crawl, the day was at hand, it was a nipping, rigorous morning,
King was lashing his horses, I was giving an arm to the old Colonel, and
the Major was coughing in our rear. I must suppose that King was a
thought careless, being nearly in desperation about his team, and, in
spite of the cold morning, breathing hot with his exertions. We came, at
last, a little before sunrise to the summit of a hill, and saw the
high-road passing at right angles through an open country of meadows and
hedgerow pollards; and not only the York mail, speeding smoothly at the
gallop of the four horses, but a post-chaise besides, with the post-boy
titupping briskly, and the traveller himself putting his head out of the
window, but whether to breathe the dawn, or the better to observe the
passage of the mail, I do not know. So that we enjoyed for an instant a
picture of free life on the road, in its most luxurious forms of
despatch and comfort. And thereafter, with a poignant feeling of
contrast in our hearts, we must mount again into our wheeled dungeon.

We came to our stages at all sorts of odd hours, and they were in all
kinds of odd places. I may say at once that my first experience was my
best. Nowhere again were we so well entertained as at Burchell Fenn's.
And this, I suppose, was natural, and indeed inevitable, in so long and
secret a journey. The first stop, we lay six hours in a barn standing by