United States or Venezuela ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I went by the post-waggon, with two slow horses and ten passengers, fifteen miles up the Iselthal, to Windisch-Matrei, a village whose early history is lost in the mist of antiquity, and whose streets are pervaded with odours which must have originated at the same time with the village. One wishes that they also might have shared the fate of its early history.
This memorable combat being thus determined, and everything that was remarkable in Antwerp surveyed, they sent their baggage down the Scheldt to Rotterdam, and set out for the same place in a post-waggon, which that same evening brought them in safety to the banks of the Maese.
It was like being in a small boat in a smart cross-choppy sea, with little torpedoes exploding beneath the keel at three minute intervals; and this road was marked on the map as a first-class road; the mind staggers at what the second and third-class must be like. These countries are still barbarous at heart, but Europe cries out upon open atrocities, and so they have invented the post-waggon.
Then they departed in a post-waggon for Amsterdam, being provided with letters of introduction to an English merchant residing in that city, under whose auspices they visited everything worth seeing, and among other excursions, went to see a Dutch tragedy acted, an entertainment which, of all others, had the strangest effect upon the organs of our hero; the dress of their chief personages was so antic, their manner so awkwardly absurd, and their language so ridiculously unfit for conveying the sentiment of love and honour, that Peregrine's nerves were diuretically affected with the complicated absurdity, and he was compelled to withdraw twenty times before the catastrophe of the piece.
The next morning they started in the post-waggon for Paris, and arrived there after thirty-six hours' travel. Harry was struck with the roads, which were far better tended and kept than those in England. The extreme flatness of the country surprised him, and, except in the quaintness of the villages and the variety of the church towers, he saw little to admire during the journey.
"En route for Paris," was the last order which I heard; and with a gendarme, in the strange kind of post-waggon which was rolled out from the farmer's stable, I was dispatched, before daybreak, on my startling journey. I found my gendarme a facetious fellow; though his merriment might not be well adapted to cheer his prisoner.
"In the post-waggon," replied Jan. "Why did you leave your passports in the post-waggon?" "Because they were in the pocket of my great-coat." "Why did you leave your great-coat in the post-waggon?" "Because it is hot." "I shall have to arrest you," quoth the gendarme.
Word Of The Day