y the kisses and tears were finished off in the street.

After all this introduction, it is painful to describe how the company
travelled. It was in a stage waggon! But they could not help it. We
never stated that they were out-and-out quality; and not even all the
quality could travel in four coaches and six, with twelve horsemen
riding attendance, and an unpaid escort of butchers, bakers, and
apothecaries, whipping and spurring part of the way for the custom. What
could the poor Commons do? There were not stage coaches in every quarter
of the great roads; and really if they pocketed their gentility, the
huge brown waggons were of the two extinct conveyances the roomier,
airier, and safer both from overturns and highwaymen. The seats were
soft, the space was ample, and the three unprotected females were
considered in a manner incognito, which was about as modest a style as
they could travel in. Of course, they were not in their flowered silks,
their lutestrings, their mantuas. We are assured every respectable woman
travelled then in a habit and hat, and no more thought of hoops than of
hair powder. The only peculiarity was that beneath their hats they wore
mob-caps, tied soberly under the chin, and red or blue handkerchiefs
knotted over the hat, which gave them the air of Welsh market-women, or
marvellously clean and tidy gipsies. Clarissa was spelling out the words
in _Pharamond_--a French classic; Dulcie was looking disconsolately
straight before her through their sole outlet, the bow at the end of the
waggon, which circumscribed as pretty and fresh a circle of common and
cornfield, with crimson patches of wood and the blue sky above, as one
might wish to see. Occasionally the crack of a sportsman's gun was heard
to the right or left, followed by a pheasant or a string of partridges
darting across the opening of the canvas car; but as yet no claimant had
solicited the privilege and honour of sharing the waggon and the view
with our fair travellers.

II.--TWO LADS SEEK A CAST IN THE WAGGON.

"Hullo, Joe! we want a lift," cries a brisk voice, and the couple of
great steeds--they might have been Flanders mares or Clydesdale horses,
so powerful were they over the shoulders, so mighty in the
flanks--almost swerved out of their direct line and their decorum. Two
fellows suddenly started up from a couch where they had lain at length
on a hay-stack, slid down the height, crashed over an intervening bit of
waste land, and