The interior closed
with a door, and was of a bigness to contain a good load of calico,
or (at a pinch and if it were necessary) four or five persons.
But, indeed, if human beings were meant to travel there, they had
my pity! They must travel in the dark, for there was no sign of a
window; and they would be shaken all the way like a phial of
doctor's stuff, for the cart was not only ungainly to look at--it
was besides very imperfectly balanced on the one pair of wheels,
and pitched unconscionably. Altogether, if I had any glancing idea
that the cart was really a carriage, I had soon dismissed it; but I
was still inquisitive as to what it should contain, and where it
had come from. Wheels and horses were splashed with many different
colours of mud, as though they had come far and across a
considerable diversity of country. The driver continually and
vainly plied his whip. It seemed to follow they had made a long,
perhaps an all-night, stage; and that the driver, at that early
hour of a little after eight in the morning, already felt himself
belated. I looked for the name of the proprietor on the shaft, and
started outright. Fortune had favoured the careless: it was
Burchell Fenn!
'A wet morning, my man,' said I.
The driver, a loutish fellow, shock-headed and turnip-faced,
returned not a word to my salutation, but savagely flogged his
horses.
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