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 rarified 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 gray.The roads, the trees, thatched roofs of cottages and homesteads, the ricks in farmers' yards.Out-door work was abandoned, horse-troughs at road- side 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 of the solitary coach going by.I don't know when the snow begin 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 asto 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 hedge-rows 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 hillside.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, weremen and boys of snow; and the bleak wild solitude to which they at last dismissed us was a snowy Sahara.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 drowsy state.I found that we were going to change.
They helped me out, and I said to a waiter, whose bare head became as white as King Lear's in a single minute, "What Inn is this?""The Holly-Tree, sir," said he.
"Upon my word, I believe," said I, apologetically, to the guard and coachman, "that I must stop here."Now the landlord, and the landlady, and the ostler, and the post- boy, and all the stable authorities, had already asked the coachman, to the wide- eyed interest of all the rest of the establishment, if he meant to go on.The coachman had already replied, "Yes, he'd take her through it,"-- meaning by Her the coach,--"if so be as George would stand by him." George was the guard, and he had already sworn that he would stand by him.So the helpers were already getting the horses out.
