g."

Polite condolences from Velvet-cap.

"I say, are these your Italian skies? Is Nice no better than this? By
George, I didn't come here for this, though!"

Assurances of the unusually bad weather this season from Velvet-cap.

"No, but just hark! what a confounded row and jabber those fellows keep
up."

A simultaneous "Ee-ye-ho! ee-yuch-yuch!" came from the striving men at
this moment, and our British acquaintance, with a hasty "Good night!"
hurried off to see the result. It was this time a successful one; the
leaning diligence was plucked out, restored to an upright position, and
its passengers were reassembled. Once more on its way, our conductor
returned to his own coach; and, with the help of our postilion,
reharnessed our horses. But the difficulty now was to start them. Tired
with their unexpected task of having to tug at another and a stuck-fast
diligence,--made startlish with having to stand in the rain and chill
night air, in the open road, while the debates were going on as to the
best method of attaching them to the sunken vehicle,--when once put back
into their own traces, they took to rearing and kicking instead of
proceeding. It is by no means amusing to sit in a diligence behind five
plunging horses, on a cliff-road,--one edge of which overhangs the sea,
and the other consists of a deep ditch or water-way, beneath a sheer
upright rock,--"when rain and wind beat dark December"; and even after
whip and whoop had succeeded in prevailing on the rearers and kickers to
"take the road" again, that road proved so unprecedentedly bad as almost
to render futile the struggles of the poor beasts. They did their best;
they strained their haunches, they bent their heads forward, they
actually made leaps of motion, in trying to lug the clogged wheels on
through the sludge and clammy soil; but this was a _mauvais pas_, where
the _cantonniers'_ good offices in road-mending had been lately
neglected, and it seemed almost an impossibility to get through with our
tired cattle. However, the thing was achieved, and the town of San Remo
at length reached.

Here, with a change of horses, it was now our turn to have a drunken
postilion; whom our conductor, after seizing him by the collar with both
hands, permitted to mount to his high seat and gather up the reins,
there being no other driver to be had. Smacking his long whip with an
energy that made the night-echoes resound far and wide, galloping his
horses up hill at a