common with some other people, affecting to
lament now, but which everybody dreaded as
a very serious penance then. I had secured
the box-seat on the fastest of these, and my
business in Fleet Street was, to get into a cab
with my portmanteau, so to make the best of
my way to the Peacock at Islington, where I
was to join this coach. But, when one of our
Temple watchmen who carried my portmanteau
into Fleet Street for me, told me about the
huge blocks of ice that had for some days
past been floating in the river, having closed
up in the night and made a walk from the
Temple Gardens over to the Surrey shore, I
began to ask myself the question, Whether the
box-seat would not be likely to put a sudden
and a frosty end to my unhappiness? I was
heart-broken, it is true, and yet I was not
quite so far gone as to wish to be frozen to
death.

When I got up to the Peacock—where I
found everybody drinking hot purl, in self-
preservation—I asked, if there were an inside
seat to spare? I then discovered that, inside
or out, I was the only passenger. This gave
me a still livelier idea of the great inclemency
of the weather, since that coach always loaded
particularly well. However, I took a little
purl (which I found uncommonly good), and
got into the coach. When I was seated,
they built me up with straw to the waist,
and, conscious of making a rather ridiculous
appearance, I began my journey.

It was still dark when we left the Peacock.
For a little while, pale uncertain ghosts of houses
and trees appeared and vanished, and then it
was hard, black, frozen day. People were
lighting their fires; smoke was mounting
straight up, high into the rarefied air; and
we were rattling for Highgate Archway
over the hardest ground I have ever heard
the ring of iron shoes on. As we got into
the country, everything seemed to have grown
old and grey. The roads, the trees, thatched
roofa of cottages and homesteads, the ricks in
farmers' yards. Out-door work was
abandoned, horse-troughs at roadside Inns were
frozen hard, no stragglers lounged about, doors
were close shut, little turnpike-houses had
blazing fires inside, and children (even turnpike-
people have children, and seem to like
them), rubbed the frost from the little panes
of glass with their chubby arms, that their
bright eyes might catch a glimpse pf the
solitary coach going by. I don't know when
the snow began to set in; but, I know
that we were changing horses somewhere
when I heard the guard remark, "That the
old lady up in the sky was picking her geese
pretty hard to-day." Then, indeed, I found
the white down falling fast and thick.

The lonely day wore on, and I dozed it out
as a lonely traveller does. I was warm and
valiant after eating and drinking—particularly
after dinner; cold and depressed at all other
times. I was always bewildered as to time
and place, and always more or less out of my
senses. The coach and horses seemed to
execute in chorus, Auld Lang Syne, without
a moment's intermission. They kept the time
and tune with the greatest regularity, and
rose into the swell at the beginning of the
Refrain, with a precision that worried me to
death. While we changed horses, the guard
and coachman went stumping up and down
the road, printing off their shoes in the snow,
and poured so much liquid consolation into
themselves without being any the worse for
it, that I began to confound them, as it
darkened again, with two great white casks
standing on end. Our horses tumbled down
in solitary places, and we got them up—
which was the pleasantest variety I had, for
it warmed me. And it snowed and snowed,
and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.
All night long, we went on in this manner.
Thus, we came round the clock, upon the Great
North Road, to the performance of Auld Lang
Syne by day again. And it snowed and
snowed, and still it snowed, and never left off
snowing.

I forget now, where we were at noon on the
second day, and where we ought to have
been; but, I know that we were scores of miles
behindhand, and that our case was growing
worse every hour. The drift was becoming
prodigiously deep; landmarks were getting
snowed out; the road and the fields were all
one; instead of having fences and hedgerows
to guide us, we went crunching on, over an
unbroken surface of ghastly white that
might sink beneath us at any moment and
drop us down a whole hill-side. Still, the
coachman and guard—who kept together on
the box, always in council, and looking well
about them—made out the track with
astonishing sagacity.

When we came in sight of a town, it looked,
to my fancy, like a large drawing on a slate,
with abundance of slate-pencil expended on
the churches and houses where the snow lay
thickest. When we came within a town, and
found the church clocks all stopped, the
dial-faces choked with snow, and the Inn-
signs blotted out, it seemed as if the whole
place were overgrown with white moss. As
to the coach, it was a mere snowball;
similarly, the men and boys who ran along
beside us to the town's end, turning our
clogged wheels and encouraging our horses,
were men and boys of snow; and the bleak
wild solitude to which they at last dismissed
us, was a snowy Saharah. One would have
thought this enough; notwithstanding which,
I pledge my word that it snowed and snowed,
and still it snowed, and never left off snowing.

We performed Auld Lang Syne the whole
day; seeing nothing, out of towns and
villages, but the track of stoats, hares, and
foxes, and sometimes of birds. At nine
o'clock at night, on a Yorkshire moor, a
cheerful burst from our horn, and a welcome
sound of talking, with a glimmering and
moving about of lanterns, roused me from my