now. "We
could not make him hear; we all tried, but none of us could make him
understand." So I have to submit.

Well, we are off now. The night is coming quickly down: it will be
_quite_ dark an hour sooner than usual to-night, so low does the great
black cloud-curtain stoop to the earth's wet face. Ink above us, so
close above us, too, that it seems as if one might touch it with lifted
hand; ink around us; a great stretch of dull and sulky heather; and,
maddening around us with devilish glee, hitting us, buffeting us,
bruising us, taking away our breath, and making our eyelids smart, is a
wind--such a wind! I should have laughed if any one had told me an hour
ago that it would rise. I should have said it was impossible, and yet it
certainly has.

The wind which turned my umbrella inside out was a zephyr compared to
that which is now _thundering_ round us. Sometimes, for one, for two
false moments, it lulls (the lulls are almost awfuller than the
whirlwind that follows them), then with gathered might it comes tearing,
howling, whooping down on us again, gnashing its angry teeth; bellowing
with a voice like ten million lost devils. And on its pinions what rain
it brings; what stinging, lacerating, bitter rain! And now, to add to
our misfortunes, to pile Pelion on Ossa, we _lose our way_. Mr. Parker
cannot be persuaded to abandon the idea of the short-cut. The natural
result follows.

If we were hopelessly bewildered--utterly at sea among the maze of
lonely roads into which he has again betrayed us at high noon--what must
we be now in the angry dark of the evening? This time we have to go into
a field to turn, a field full of tussocks, which in the dark we are
unable to see, and over which the horses flounder and stumble. However,
now at length--now that we have wasted three-quarters of an hour, and
that it is quite pitch dark--(I need hardly say that we have no
lamps)--we have at length regained the blessed breadth of the high-road,
and I think that not even our coachman, to whose faith most things seem
possible, will attempt to leave it a second time. I give a sigh of
relief.

"It is all plain sailing now!" Musgrave says, reassuringly.

"There is one bad turn," reply I, gloomily--"very bad, at the bottom of
the village by the bridge."

We relapse into silence, and into our unnatural battle with the
elements. I have to grasp my hat firmly with one hand, and the side of
the coach with the other, to prevent being