d more by luck, I fancy, than by skill, I
took the neck off, leaving nothing but the thick ring of the mouth still
sticking on the summit of the fence.

"I'll hold you a dozen of my best Regalias against as many of Manillas,
that I break the ring."

"Done, Harry!"

"Done!"

Again the pistol cracked, and the unerring ball drove the small fragment
into a thousand splinters.

"That fotched 'um!" exclaimed Tim, who had come up to announce all
ready. "Ecod, measter Frank, you munna wager i' that gate* [*Gate--
Yorkshire; Anglice, way.] wi' master, or my name beant Tim, but thou'lt
be clean bamboozled."

Well, not to make a short story long, we got under way again, and, with
speed unabated, spanked along at full twelve miles an hour for five
miles farther. There, down a wild looking glen, on the left hand, comes
brawling, over stump and stone, a tributary streamlet, by the side of
which a rough track, made by the charcoal burners and the iron miners,
intersects the main road; and up this miserable looking path, for it was
little more, Harry wheeled at full trot. "Now for twelve miles of
mountain, the roughest road and wildest country you ever saw crossed in
a phaeton, good master Frank."

And wild it was, indeed, and rough enough in all conscience; narrow,
unfenced in many places, winding along the brow of precipices without
rail or breast-work, encumbered with huge blocks of stone, and broken by
the summer rains! An English stage coachman would have stared aghast at
the steep zigzags up the hills, the awkward turns on the descents, the
sudden pitches, with now an unsafe bridge, and now a stony ford at the
bottom; but through all this, the delicate quick finger, keen eye, and
cool head of Harry, assisted by the rare mouths of his exquisitely
bitted cattle, piloted us at the rate of full ten miles the hour; the
scenery, through which the wild track ran, being entirely of the most
wild and savage character of woodland; the bottom filled with gigantic
timber trees, cedar, and pine, and hemlock, with a dense undergrowth of
rhododendron, calmia, and azalia, which, as my friend informed me, made
the whole mountains in the summer season one rich bed of bloom. About
six miles from the point where we had entered them we scaled the highest
ridge of the hills, by three almost precipitous zigzags, the topmost
ledge paved by a stratum of broken shaley limestone; and, passing at
once from the forest into well cultivated fields, ca