e inevitable familiarities of the journey.
He turned out at each stage the pink of serving-lads, deft, civil,
prompt, attentive, touching his hat like an automaton, raising the
status of Mr. Ramornie in the eyes of all the inn by his smiling
service, and seeming capable of anything in the world but the one thing
I had chosen--learning French!

CHAPTER XXIII

THE ADVENTURE OF THE RUNAWAY COUPLE

The country had for some time back been changing in character. By a
thousand indications I could judge that I was again drawing near to
Scotland. I saw it written in the face of the hills, in the growth of
the trees, and in the glint of the waterbrooks that kept the high-road
company. It might have occurred to me, also, that I was, at the same
time, approaching a place of some fame in Britain--Gretna Green. Over
these same leagues of road--which Rowley and I now traversed in the
claret-coloured chaise, to the note of the flageolet and the French
lesson--how many pairs of lovers had gone bowling northwards to the
music of sixteen scampering horseshoes; and how many irate persons,
parents, uncles, guardians, evicted rivals, had come tearing after,
clapping the frequent red face to the chaise-window, lavishly shedding
their gold about the post-houses, sedulously loading and reloading, as
they went, their avenging pistols! But I doubt if I had thought of it at
all, before a wayside hazard swept me into the thick of an adventure of
this nature; and I found myself playing providence with other people's
lives, to my own admiration at the moment--and subsequently to my own
brief but passionate regret.

At rather an ugly corner of an uphill reach I came on the wreck of a
chaise lying on one side in the ditch, a man and a woman in animated
discourse in the middle of the road, and the two postillions, each with
his pair of horses, looking on and laughing from the saddle.

"Morning breezes! here's a smash!" cried Rowley, pocketing his
flageolet in the middle of the "Tight Little Island."

I was perhaps more conscious of the moral smash than the physical--more
alive to broken hearts than to broken chaises; for, as plain as the sun
at morning, there was a screw loose in this runaway match. It is always
a bad sign when the lower classes laugh: their taste in humour is both
poor and sinister; and for a man, running the posts with four horses,
presumably with open pockets, and in the company of the most entrancing
little creature c