y a day's slow work--in a cart."

"Hold your prate, and be hanged to you!" muttered O'Shea, as between
anger and stooping, he was threatened with a small apoplexy. "Move them
on gently for a few yards, till I get a look at him."

Joe leisurely moved into his master's place, and bestowed the rug very
comfortably around his legs. This done, with a degree of detail and
delay that seemed almost intended to irritate, he next slowly arranged
the reins in his fingers, and then, with a jerk of his whip-hand,
sending out the lash in a variety of curves, he brought the whipcord
down on the leader with a "nip" that made him plunge, while the wheeler,
understanding the hint, started off at full swing. So sudden and
unexpected was the start, that O'Shea had barely time to spring out of
the way to escape the wheel. Before, indeed, he had thoroughly recovered
his footing, Joe had swept past a short turning of the road, leaving
nothing but a light train of dust to mark his course.

"Stop! pull up! stop! confound you!" cried O'Shea, with other little
expletives that print is not called on to repeat, and then, boiling
with passion, he set off in pursuit. When he had gained the angle of the
road, it was only to catch one look at his equipage as it disappeared in
the distance; the road, dipping suddenly, showed him little more than
a torso of the "faithful Joe," diminishing rapidly to a head, and then
vanishing entirely.

"What a scoundrel! what a rascal!" cried O'Shea, as he wiped his
forehead; and then, with his fist clenched and upraised, "registered a
vow," as Mr. O'Connell used to say, of unlimited vengeance. If this true
history does not record the full measure of the heart-devouring anger
of O'Shea, it is not from any sense of its being undeserved or
unreasonable, for, after all, worthy reader, it might have pushed even
_your_ patience to have been left standing, of a sharp November morning,
on a lonely road, while your carriage was driven off by an insolent
"flunkey."

As he was about midway between the Bagni and the town of Lucca, to which
he was bound, he half hesitated whether to go on or to return. There
was shame in either course,--shame in going back to recount his
misadventure; shame in having to call Joe to a reckoning in Lucca before
a crowd of strangers, and that vile population of the stable-yard, with
which, doubtless, Joe would have achieved popularity before his master
could arrive.

Of a verity the situation w