ses. The
coach and horses seemed to execute in chorus Auld Lang Syne, without a
moment's intermission. They kept the time and tune with the greatest
regularity, and rose into the swell at the beginning of the Refrain, with
a precision that worried me to death. While we changed horses, the guard
and coachman went stumping up and down the road, printing off their shoes
in the snow, and poured so much liquid consolation into themselves
without being any the worse for it, that I began to confound them, as it
darkened again, with two great white casks standing on end. Our horses
tumbled down in solitary places, and we got them up,--which was the
pleasantest variety _I_ had, for it warmed me. And it snowed and snowed,
and still it snowed, and never left off snowing. All night long we went
on in this manner. Thus we came round the clock, upon the Great North
Road, to the performance of Auld Lang Syne by day again. And it snowed
and snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.

I forget now where we were at noon on the second day, and where we ought
to have been; but I know that we were scores of miles behindhand, and
that our case was growing worse every hour. The drift was becoming
prodigiously deep; landmarks were getting snowed out; the road and the
fields were all one; instead of having fences and hedge-rows to guide us,
we went crunching on over an unbroken surface of ghastly white that might
sink beneath us at any moment and drop us down a whole hillside. Still
the coachman and guard--who kept together on the box, always in council,
and looking well about them--made out the track with astonishing
sagacity.

When we came in sight of a town, it looked, to my fancy, like a large
drawing on a slate, with abundance of slate-pencil expended on the
churches and houses where the snow lay thickest. When we came within a
town, and found the church clocks all stopped, the dial-faces choked with
snow, and the inn-signs blotted out, it seemed as if the whole place were
overgrown with white moss. As to the coach, it was a mere snowball;
similarly, the men and boys who ran along beside us to the town's end,
turning our clogged wheels and encouraging our horses, were men and boys
of snow; and the bleak wild solitude to which they at last dismissed us
was a snowy Sahara. One would have thought this enough: notwithstanding
which, I pledge my word that it snowed and snowed, and still it snowed,
and never left off