tected the
traveller. Numerous coaches of different rates of charge, and as many
packets, are perpetually passing and repassing betwixt the capital of
Britain and her northern sister, so that the most timid or indolent may
execute such a journey upon a few hours' notice. But it was different in
1737. So slight and infrequent was the intercourse betwixt London and
Edinburgh, that men still alive remember that upon one occasion the mail
from the former city arrived at the General Post-Office in Scotland with
only one letter in it.*

* The fact is certain. The single epistle was addressed to the principal
director of the British Linen Company.

The usual mode of travelling was by means of post-horses, the traveller
occupying one, and his guide another, in which manner, by relays of
horses from stage to stage, the journey might be accomplished in a
wonderfully short time by those who could endure fatigue. To have the
bones shaken to pieces by a constant change of those hacks was a luxury
for the rich--the poor were under the necessity of using the mode of
conveyance with which nature had provided them.

With a strong heart, and a frame patient of fatigue, Jeanie Deans,
travelling at the rate of twenty miles a-day, and sometimes farther,
traversed the southern part of Scotland, and advanced as far as Durham.

Hitherto she had been either among her own country-folk, or those to whom
her bare feet and tartan screen were objects too familiar to attract much
attention. But as she advanced, she perceived that both circumstances
exposed her to sarcasm and taunts, which she might otherwise have
escaped; and although in her heart she thought it unkind, and
inhospitable, to sneer at a passing stranger on account of the fashion of
her attire, yet she had the good sense to alter those parts of her dress
which attracted ill-natured observation. Her chequed screen was deposited
carefully in her bundle, and she conformed to the national extravagance
of wearing shoes and stockings for the whole day. She confessed
afterwards, that, "besides the wastrife, it was lang or she could walk
sae comfortably with the shoes as without them; but there was often a bit
saft heather by the road-side, and that helped her weel on." The want of
the screen, which was drawn over the head like a veil, she supplied by a
_bon-grace,_ as she called it; a large straw bonnet like those worn by
the English maidens when labouring in the fields. "But I thought unco