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The stage was spattered with mud from roof to wheel-tire, but as the mire was not fresh and the road fair, the presumption followed that custom and practice precluded the cleaning of the coach. The passengers, among whom were several ladies, wearing coquettish bonnets with ribbons or beau-catchers attached, were too weary even to view with wonder the odd-looking theatrical caravan.

They are covered with mud from the roof to the wheel-tire, and have never been cleaned since they were first built. The tickets we have received on board the steamboat are marked No. 1, so we belong to coach No. 1. I throw my coat on the box, and hoist my wife and her maid into the inside.

"Sought she many days the lost one, Sought him ever without finding; Then the roadways come to meet her, And she asks them with beseeching: 'Roadways, ye whom God hath shapen, Have ye not my son beholden, Nowhere seen the golden apple, Him, my darling staff of silver? Prudently they gave her answer, Thus to her replied the roadways: 'For thy son we cannot plague us, We have sorrows too, a many, Since our own lot is a hard one And our fortune is but evil, By dog's feet to be run over, By the wheel-tire to be wounded, And by heavy heels down-trampled."

By the side of pebbly waters waters the cheerier for their solitude; beneath swaying fir-boughs, petted by no season, but still green in all, on I journeyed my horse and I; on, by an old saw-mill, bound down and hushed with vines, that his grating voice no more was heard; on, by a deep flume clove through snowy marble, vernal-tinted, where freshet eddies had, on each side, spun out empty chapels in the living rock; on, where Jacks-in-the-pulpit, like their Baptist namesake, preached but to the wilderness; on, where a huge, cross-grain block, fern-bedded, showed where, in forgotten times, man after man had tried to split it, but lost his wedges for his pains which wedges yet rusted in their holes; on, where, ages past, in step-like ledges of a cascade, skull-hollow pots had been churned out by ceaseless whirling of a flintstone ever wearing, but itself unworn; on, by wild rapids pouring into a secret pool, but soothed by circling there awhile, issued forth serenely; on, to less broken ground, and by a little ring, where, truly, fairies must have danced, or else some wheel-tire been heated for all was bare; still on, and up, and out into a hanging orchard, where maidenly looked down upon me a crescent moon, from morning.