there might be a sombre beauty in the scenery, music
in the breeze, and a wan procession of coaching ghosts in the sentiment
of this old turnpike-road, he was mainly puzzled about the way. The
dead men's work that had been expended in climbing that hill, the
blistered soles that had trodden it, and the tears that had wetted it,
were not his concern; for fate had given him no time for any but
practical things.

He looked north and south, and mechanically prodded the ground with his
walking-stick. A closer glance at his face corroborated the testimony
of his clothes. It was self-complacent, yet there was small apparent
ground for such complacence. Nothing irradiated it; to the eye of the
magician in character, if not to the ordinary observer, the expression
enthroned there was absolute submission to and belief in a little
assortment of forms and habitudes.

At first not a soul appeared who could enlighten him as he desired, or
seemed likely to appear that night. But presently a slight noise of
laboring wheels and the steady dig of a horse's shoe-tips became
audible; and there loomed in the notch of the hill and plantation that
the road formed here at the summit a carrier's van drawn by a single
horse. When it got nearer, he said, with some relief to himself, "'Tis
Mrs. Dollery's--this will help me."

The vehicle was half full of passengers, mostly women. He held up his
stick at its approach, and the woman who was driving drew rein.

"I've been trying to find a short way to Little Hintock this last
half-hour, Mrs. Dollery," he said. "But though I've been to Great
Hintock and Hintock House half a dozen times I am at fault about the
small village. You can help me, I dare say?"

She assured him that she could--that as she went to Great Hintock her
van passed near it--that it was only up the lane that branched out of
the lane into which she was about to turn--just ahead. "Though,"
continued Mrs. Dollery, "'tis such a little small place that, as a town
gentleman, you'd need have a candle and lantern to find it if ye don't
know where 'tis. Bedad! I wouldn't live there if they'd pay me to.
Now at Great Hintock you do see the world a bit."

He mounted and sat beside her, with his feet outside, where they were
ever and anon brushed over by the horse's tail.

This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable
attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knew
it well. The old hor