rms. The woman has paid her fare
through to Guysborough, and holds her ticket. It turns out, however,
that she wants to go to the district of Guysborough, to St. Mary's
Cross Roads, somewhere in it, and not to the village of Guysborough,
which is away down on Chedabucto Bay. (The reader will notice this
geographical familiarity.) And this stage does not go in the
direction of St. Mary's. She will not get out, she will not
surrender her ticket, nor pay her fare again. Why should she? And
the stage proprietor, the stage-driver, and the hostler mull over the
problem, and sit down on the woman's hair trunk in front of the
tavern to reason with her. The baby joins its voice from the coach
window in the clamor of the discussion. The baby prevails. The
stage company comes to a compromise, the woman dismounts, and we are
off, away from the white houses, over the sandy road, out upon a
hilly and not cheerful country. And the driver begins to tell us
stories of winter hardships, drifted highways, a land buried in snow,
and great peril to men and cattle.

III

"It was then summer, and the weather very fine; so pleased was I with
the country, in which I had never travelled before, that my delight
proved equal to my wonder."--BENVENUTO CELLINI.

There are few pleasures in life equal to that of riding on the
box-seat of a stagecoach, through a country unknown to you and
hearing the driver talk about his horses. We made the intimate
acquaintance of twelve horses on that day's ride, and learned the
peculiar disposition and traits of each one of them, their ambition
of display, their sensitiveness to praise or blame, their
faithfulness, their playfulness, the readiness with which they
yielded to kind treatment, their daintiness about food and lodging.

May I never forget the spirited little jade, the off-leader in the
third stage, the petted belle of the route, the nervous, coquettish,
mincing mare of Marshy Hope. A spoiled beauty she was; you could see
that as she took the road with dancing step, tossing her pretty head
about, and conscious of her shining black coat and her tail done up
"in any simple knot,"--like the back hair of Shelley's Beatrice
Cenci. How she ambled and sidled and plumed herself, and now and
then let fly her little heels high in air in mere excess of larkish
feeling.

"So! girl; so! Kitty," murmurs the driver in the softest tones of
admiration; "she don't mean anything by it, she's just like a
kitten