e trees and hedges, and boys in solitary fields,
frightening them away with rattles. The coming to a town--people busy
in the markets; light carts and chaises round the tavern yard;
tradesmen standing at their doors; men running horses up and down the
street for sale; pigs plunging and grunting in the dirty distance,
getting off with long strings at their legs, running into clean
chemists' shops and being dislodged with brooms by 'prentices; the
night coach changing horses--the passengers cheerless, cold, ugly, and
discontented, with three months' growth of hair in one night--the
coachman fresh as from a band-box, and exquisitely beautiful by
contrast:--so much bustle, so many things in motion, such a variety of
incidents--when was there a journey with so many delights as that
journey in the waggon!

Sometimes walking for a mile or two while her grandfather rode inside,
and sometimes even prevailing upon the schoolmaster to take her place
and lie down to rest, Nell travelled on very happily until they came to
a large town, where the waggon stopped, and where they spent a night.
They passed a large church; and in the streets were a number of old
houses, built of a kind of earth or plaster, crossed and re-crossed in
a great many directions with black beams, which gave them a remarkable
and very ancient look. The doors, too, were arched and low, some with
oaken portals and quaint benches, where the former inhabitants had sat
on summer evenings. The windows were latticed in little diamond panes,
that seemed to wink and blink upon the passengers as if they were dim
of sight. They had long since got clear of the smoke and furnaces,
except in one or two solitary instances, where a factory planted among
fields withered the space about it, like a burning mountain. When they
had passed through this town, they entered again upon the country, and
began to draw near their place of destination.

It was not so near, however, but that they spent another night upon the
road; not that their doing so was quite an act of necessity, but that
the schoolmaster, when they approached within a few miles of his
village, had a fidgety sense of his dignity as the new clerk, and was
unwilling to make his entry in dusty shoes, and travel-disordered
dress. It was a fine, clear, autumn morning, when they came upon the
scene of his promotion, and stopped to contemplate its beauties.

'See--here's the church!' cried the delighted schoolmaster in