Chapter 1 - Page 2

At first not a soul appeared who could enlighten him as he
desired, or seemed likely to appear that night. But presently a
slight noise of laboring wheels and the steady dig of a horse's
shoe-tips became audible; and there loomed in the notch of the
hill and plantation that the road formed here at the summit a
carrier's van drawn by a single horse. When it got nearer, he
said, with some relief to himself, "'Tis Mrs. Dollery's--this will
help me."

The vehicle was half full of passengers, mostly women. He held up
his stick at its approach, and the woman who was driving drew
rein.

"I've been trying to find a short way to Little Hintock this last
half-hour, Mrs. Dollery," he said. "But though I've been to Great
Hintock and Hintock House half a dozen times I am at fault about
the small village. You can help me, I dare say?"

She assured him that she could--that as she went to Great Hintock
her van passed near it--that it was only up the lane that branched
out of the lane into which she was about to turn--just ahead.
"Though," continued Mrs. Dollery, "'tis such a little small place
that, as a town gentleman, you'd need have a candle and lantern to
find it if ye don't know where 'tis. Bedad! I wouldn't live there
if they'd pay me to. Now at Great Hintock you do see the world a
bit."

He mounted and sat beside her, with his feet outside, where they
were ever and anon brushed over by the horse's tail.

This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable
attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who
knew it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and
color of heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were
distorted by harness and drudgery from colthood--though if all had
their rights, he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been
picking the herbage of some Eastern plain instead of tugging here--
had trodden this road almost daily for twenty years. Even his
subjection was not made congruous throughout, for the harness
being too short, his tail was not drawn through the crupper, so
that the breeching slipped awkwardly to one side. He knew every
subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of ground between
Hintock and Sherton Abbas--the market-town to which he journeyed--
as accurately as any surveyor could have learned it by a Dumpy
level.

The vehicle had a square black tilt which nodded with the motion
of the wheels, and at a point in it over the driver's head was a
hook to which the reins were hitched at times, when they formed a
catenary curve from the horse's shoulders. Somewhere about the
axles was a loose chain, whose only known purpose was to clink as
it went. Mrs. Dollery, having to hop up and down many