ed with the
discharge of drains and ditches; and I looked forward to a day of
downpour and the hell of wet clothes, in which particular I am as dainty
as a cat. At the corner of the road, and by the last glint of the
drowning sun, I spied a covered cart, of a kind that I thought I had
never seen before, preceding me at the foot's pace of jaded horses.
Anything is interesting to a pedestrian that can help him to forget the
miseries of a day of rain; and I bettered my pace and gradually overtook
the vehicle.

The nearer I came the more it puzzled me. It was much such a cart as I
am told the calico-printers use, mounted on two wheels, and furnished
with a seat in front for the driver. 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. The tired
animals, who could scarce put the one foot before the other, paid no
attention to his cruelty; and I continued without effort to maintain my
position alongside, smiling to myself at the futility of his attempts,
and at the same time pricked with curiosity as to why he made them. I
made no such formidable a figure as that a man should flee when I
accosted him; and, my conscience not being ent