Page:McClure's Magazine v9 n3 to v10 no2.djvu/62

788 hardly crawl, the day was at hand, it was a nipping, rigorous morning; King was lashing his horses, I was giving an arm to the old colonel, and the major was coughing in our rear. I must suppose that King was a thought careless, being nearly in desperation about his team, and in spite of the cold morning, breathing hot with his exertions. We came, at last, a little before sunrise, to the summit of a hill, and saw the high-road passing at right angles through an open country of meadows and hedgerow pollards; and not only the York mail, speeding smoothly at the gallop of the four horses, but a post-chaise besides, with the postboy titupping briskly, and the traveler himself putting his head out of the window, but whether to breathe the dawn, or the better to observe the passage of the mail, I do not know. So that we enjoyed for an instant a picture of free life on the road, in its most luxurious forms of despatch and comfort. And thereafter, with a poignant feeling of contrast in our hearts, we must mount again into our wheeled dungeon.

We came to our stages at all sorts of odd hours, and they were in all kinds of odd places. I may say at once that my first experience was my best. Nowhere again were we so well entertained as at Burchell Fenn's. And this, I suppose, was natural and, indeed, inevitable in long and secret a journey. The first stop, we lay six hours in a barn standing by itself in a poor, marshy orchard, and packed with hay. To make it more attractive, we were told it had been the scene of an abominable murder and was now haunted. But the day was beginning to break, and our fatigue was too extreme for visionary terrors. The second or third, we alighted on a barren heath about midnight, built a fire to warm us under the shelter of some thorns, supped like beggars on bread and a piece of cold bacon, and slept like gipsies with our feet to the fire. In the meanwhile, King was gone with the cart, I know not where, to get a change of horses, and it was late in the dark morning when he returned and we were able to resume our journey. In the middle of another night, we came to a stop by an ancient, white-washed cottage of two stories; a privet hedge surrounded it; the frosty moon shone blankly on the upper windows; but through those of the kitchen the firelight was seen glinting on the roof and reflected from the dishes on the wall, Here, after much hammering on the door, King managed to arouse an old crone from the chimney-corner chair, where she had been dozing in the watch; and we were had in, and entertained with a dish of hot tea. This old lady was an aunt of Burchell Fenn's—and an unwilling partner in his dangerous trade. Though the house stood solitary, and the hour was an unlikely one for any passenger upon the road, King and she conversed in whispers only. There was something dismal, something of the sick-room, in this perpetual, guarded sibilation. The apprehensions of our hostess insensibly communicated themselves to every one present. We ate like mice in a cat's ear; if one of us jingled a teaspoon, all would start; and when the hour came to take the road again, we drew a long breath of relief, and climbed to our places in the covered cart with a positive sense of escape. The most of our meals, however, were taken boldly at hedgerow ale-houses, usually at untimely hours of the day, when the clients were in the field or the farmyard at labor. I shall have to tell presently of our last experience of the sort, and how unfortunately it miscarried; but as that was the signal for my separation from my fellow-travelers, I must first finish with them.

I had never any occasion to waver in my first judgment of the colonel. The old gentleman seemed to me, and still seems so in the retrospect, the salt of the earth. I had occasion to see him in the extremes of hardship, hunger, and cold; he was dying, and he looked it; and yet I cannot remember any hasty, harsh, or impatient word to have fallen from his lips. On the contrary, he ever showed himself careful to please, and even if he rambled in his talk, rambled always gently—like a humane, half-witted old hero, true to his colors to the last. I would not dare to say how often he awoke suddenly from a lethargy and told us again, as though we had never heard it, the story of how he had earned the cross, how it had been given him by the hand of the emperor, and of the innocent—and, indeed, foolish—sayings of his daughter when he returned with it on his bosom. He had another anecdote which he was very apt to give, by way of a rebuke, when the major wearied us beyond endurance with dispraises of the English. This was an account of the "braves gens" with whom he had been boarding. True enough, he was a man so simple and grateful by nature that the most common civilities were able to touch him to the heart and would remain written in his memory; but from a thousand inconsiderable but