iles round; and three or four bare-legged fellows
went out to look for 'em, while we sat by the fire and tried to dry
ourselves. At last we got off again (without the drag and with a broken
spring, no smith living within ten miles), and went limping on to
Inverouran. In the first three miles we were in a ditch and out again,
and lost a horse's shoe. All this time it never once left off raining;
and was very windy, very cold, very misty, and most intensely dismal. So
we crossed the Black Mount, and came to a place we had passed the day
before, where a rapid river runs over a bed of broken rock. Now, this
river, sir, had a bridge last winter, but the bridge broke down when the
thaw came, and has never since been mended; so travelers cross upon a
little platform, made of rough deal planks stretching from rock to rock;
and carriages and horses ford the water, at a certain point. As the
platform is the reverse of steady (we had proved this the day before),
is very slippery, and affords anything but a pleasant footing, having
only a trembling little rail on one side, and on the other nothing
between it and the foaming stream, Kate decided to remain in the
carriage, and trust herself to the wheels rather than to her feet.
Fletcher and I had got out, and it was going away, when I advised her,
as I had done several times before, to come with us; for I saw that the
water was very high, the current being greatly swollen by the rain, and
that the post-boy had been eyeing it in a very disconcerted manner for
the last half-hour. This decided her to come out; and Fletcher, she,
Tom, and I, began to cross, while the carriage went about a quarter of a
mile down the bank, in search of a shallow place. The platform shook so
much that we could only come across two at a time, and then it felt as
if it were hung on springs. As to the wind and rain! . . . well, put into
one gust all the wind and rain you ever saw and heard, and you'll have
some faint notion of it! When we got safely to the opposite bank, there
came riding up a wild Highlander, in a great plaid, whom we recognized
as the landlord of the inn, and who, without taking the least notice of
us, went dashing on,--with the plaid he was wrapped in, streaming in the
wind,--screeching in Gaelic to the post-boy on the opposite bank, and
making the most frantic gestures you ever saw, in which he was joined by
some other wild man on foot, who had come across by a short cut,
knee-deep in mire