of ninety miles. Why, the great deeds of Redmond O'Hanlon were nothing
to this! I'll remember it to my dying day, and with reason," added he,
uneasily shifting his position on the saddle.

_CHAPTER IX_

_EXCITEMENT_

How fled what moonshine faintly showed!
How fled what darkness hid!
How fled the earth beneath their feet,
The heaven above their head.

_William and Helen._

Dick Turpin, meanwhile, held bravely on his course. Bess was neither
strained by her gliding passage down the slippery hill-side nor shaken
by _larking_ the fence in the meadow. As Dick said, "It took a devilish
deal to take it out of her." On regaining the high road she resumed her
old pace, and once more they were distancing Time's swift chariot in
its whirling passage o'er the earth. Stamford, and the tongue of
Lincoln's fenny shire, upon which it is situated, were passed almost in
a breath. Rutland is won and passed, and Lincolnshire once more entered.
The road now verged within a bowshot of that sporting Athens--Corinth,
perhaps, we should say--Melton Mowbray. Melton was then unknown to fame,
but, as if inspired by that _furor venaticus_ which now inspires all who
come within twenty miles of this Charybdis of the chase, Bess here _let
out_ in a style with which it would have puzzled the best Leicestershire
squire's best prad to have kept pace. The spirit she imbibed through the
pores of her skin, and the juices of the meat she had champed, seemed to
have communicated preternatural excitement to her. Her pace was
absolutely terrific. Her eyeballs were dilated, and glowed like flaming
carbuncles; while her widely-distended nostril seemed, in the cold
moonshine, to snort forth smoke, as from a hidden fire. Fain would
Turpin have controlled her; but, without bringing into play all his
tremendous nerve, no check could be given her headlong course, and for
once, and the only time in her submissive career, Bess resolved to have
her own way--and she had it. Like a sensible fellow, Dick conceded the
point. There was something even of conjugal philosophy in his
self-communion upon the occasion. "E'en let her take her own way and be
hanged to her, for an obstinate, self-willed jade as she is," said he:
"now her back is up there'll be no stopping her, I'm sure: she rattles
away like a woman's tongue, and when that once begins, we all know what
chance the curb has. Best to l