Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into the
ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound upon
the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the
five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the
road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks,
with rustic burial-grounds about them, where the graves are green, and
daisies sleep--for it is evening--on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past
streams, in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow;
past paddock-fences, farms, and rick-yards; past last year's stacks,
cut, slice by slice, away, and showing, in the waning light, like ruined
gables, old and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry
water-splash and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!
Was the box there, when they came up to the old finger-post? The box!
Was Mrs Lupin herself? Had she turned out magnificently as a hostess
should, in her own chaise-cart, and was she sitting in a mahogany chair,
driving her own horse Dragon (who ought to have been called Dumpling),
and looking lovely? Did the stage-coach pull up beside her, shaving her
very wheel, and even while the guard helped her man up with the trunk,
did he send the glad echoes of his bugle careering down the chimneys of
the distant Pecksniff, as if the coach expressed its exultation in the
rescue of Tom Pinch?
'This is kind indeed!' said Tom, bending down to shake hands with her.
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