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. In those days, travellers were very shy of

being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on the road

might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when

every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in

“the Captain’s” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable

nondescript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard

of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in

November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five,

lumbering up Shooter’s Hill, as he stood on his own particular

perch behind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a

hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded blunderbuss

lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a

substratum of cutlass.

The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

suspected the passengers, the passengers suspected one another

and the guard, they all suspected everybody else, and the

coachman was sure of nothing but the horses; as to which cattle he

could with a clear conscience have taken his oath on the two

Testaments that they were not fit for the journey.

“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So, then! One more pull and

you’re at the top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble

enough to get you to it!Joe!”

“Halloa!” the guard replied.

“What o’clock do you make it, Joe?”

“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”

“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “and not atop of

Shooter’s yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”

The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided

negative, made a decided scramble for it, and the three other

horses followed suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with

the jack-boots of its passengers squashing along by its side. They

had stopped when the coach stopped, and they kept close

company with it. If any one of the three had had the hardihood to

propose to another to walk on a little ahead into the mist and

darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of getting shot

instantly as a highwayman.

The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The

horses stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid

the wheel for the descent, and open the coach-door to let the

passengers in.

“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking

down from his box.