e
sweat of his brow must his bread be won.

I here waited, sheltered by a rocky projection, until the stage came up.
The continuance of the rain effectually prevented me from indulging in
any more walks this day; the tedium of the journey however, whilst light
lasted, was greatly relieved by the constant changes of mountain
scenery, as viewed through an atmosphere now wildly clear and again
thick and gloomy.

I found considerable amusement also in calculating the fair odds against
our being pitched into some one of the many deep ravines along whose
edge we were, when going down hill, whirled with startling speed. It was
at these descents that the driver sought to pull up his lost time; and
this he did with a recklessness of consequences that led me, after
mature consideration, aided by the experience of much rough travel, to
come to the following conclusion,--that, in crossing the Alleghany
mountains, when the roads are rotten and slippery, the chances for and
against a broken neck are so nearly equal that no sporting man, of any
liberality, need desire to seek odds, should he feel inclined to make a
bet before commencing the journey.

We at times encountered a string of waggons at some narrow sharp turn of
the corkscrew path, and were whirled by them, with our off-wheels
curiously circling the unguarded ledge of a precipice some four or five
hundred feet deep, where a wheel-horse suddenly jibbing, or a leader
shying or falling, would, in all human probability, have provided the
wolves and bears with a banquet, and the journalists with a neat
paragraph, headed, "Melancholy result of fast driving, attended with
serious loss of valuable lives."

The practice is for the team to be put on a run the moment they gain the
summit of a hill; and, if all things hold out, this is kept up until the
bottom be reached: the horses are excellent, and rarely fail. On my
asking the coachman,--by whom I rode as much as possible,--what he did
in the event of a wheel-horse coming down in a steep pass, he replied,
"Why, I keep driving ahead, and drag him along;"--an accident which he
assured me had occurred more than once to himself when the roads were
encrusted with ice and snow: the passengers at such times are placed in
sleighs, which are perhaps less dangerous.

On the morning of Thursday we once more arrived at the frontier town of
the low-lands of Pennsylvania,--Chambersburg; and here I quitted the
"Good Intent" line, transferrin