A Tale of Two Cities | Page 5

and stumbling between whiles, as if
they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver
rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary "Wo-ho! so-ho-
then!" the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon
it--like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be
got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger
started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its
forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none.
A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the air
in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the
waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut
out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own
workings, and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses
steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the
side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the
ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from
anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was
hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as
from the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days,
travellers were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for
anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to

the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could produce
somebody in "the Captain's" pay, ranging from the landlord to the
lowest stable non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So
the guard of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in
November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering
up Shooter's Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behind the
mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest
before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight
loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.
The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected
the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard,
they all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of
nothing but the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear
conscience have taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were
not fit for the journey.
"Wo-ho!" said the coachman. "So, then! One more pull and you're at
the top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you
to it!--Joe!"
"Halloa!" the guard replied.
"What o'clock do you make it, Joe?"
"Ten minutes, good, past eleven."
"My blood!" ejaculated the vexed coachman, "and not atop of Shooter's
yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!"
The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative,
made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed suit.
Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its
passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the
coach stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the
three had had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little
ahead into the mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair
way of getting shot instantly as a highwayman.

The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses
stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for
the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.
"Tst! Joe!" cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from
his box.
"What do you say, Tom?"
They both listened.
"I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe."
"I say a horse at a gallop, Tom," returned the guard, leaving his hold of
the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. "Gentlemen! In the kings
name, all of you!"
With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on
the offensive.
The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in;
the two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow.
He remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they
re-mained in the road below him. They all looked from the coachman
to the guard, and from the guard to the coachman, and listened. The
coachman looked back and the guard looked back,