Colin took no interest in all this, so he shut his eyes, and, after awhile, fell asleep. The horn blowing for a change of horses awoke him again. Again he went to sleep, and the same pleasing tune was played in his vexed ears, and on the same occasion, repeatedly during the night. When morning broke, he was chilled almost to death: his feet felt as though undergoing amputation: he could never have believed it was so cold in summer at any part of the twenty-four hours as he now found it. The night had been fine and dry, and daylight began with only a few thin clouds. He longed for a ray of the sun, and watched his increasing light with desire unfelt before. As he rose, however, the mists gathered, thicker and thicker as it grew lighter. Then they swept like a storm over the hills in front, and filled the valleys with a damp fog as thick as any in November. At two or three hours after sunrise, all was clear again; and he basked delightfully in the burning heat. They now began to pass droves of sheep, and herds of cattle, hundreds together, and often recurring, yet all bent the same way as themselves: they were going to London to be devoured. None seemed to come back again. They ascended a steep hill; and to the right Colin saw the longest-bodied church, with the shortest tower he had ever seen in his life: it was St. Alban's. Here a man of business, escaped from the metropolis the night before, and now fresh from sleep and breakfast, and with a “shining morning face,” gave the coachman a familiar nod and word, and jumped up, to return to his ledger. The stable-boys looked at Colin, and regarding him as a “green 'un,” winked at each other, and smiled. The coachman took no notice of him, as being considerably beneath his observation. But Colin, without troubling himself concerning other people's thoughts of him, looked at the long signs about posting at so much per mile, and at those which advertised Messrs. Mangel Wurzel and Co's Entire, and wondered what in the world they meant. Another hour or two passed, and the road seemed to our hero to be alive with all kinds of vehicles describable and nondescript. Dog-horses drawing lumbering old coaches, and dog-carts filled with country-baked bread, intermingled with spring vehicles, carrying soda-water, and carriers' carts laden with crockery, were jumbled together in all the glorious confusion and dust of a dry summer morning. Occasionally some butcher's boy, without his hat, would drive from amongst them, as though his very life depended on his speed, and shoot a-head, until, in character with all of his fraternity, he outstripped everybody, and, after the fashion of the good deities of the Heathen mythology, vanished in a cloud of his own raising.