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.
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