Hence it was that Hardenow, gazing betwixt the two feather-edged boards, beheld--just before he lost his wits--the honoured vehicle of Cripps, with empty washing baskets standing, on its welcome homeward road, to discharge the fair Etty at her brother's gate. Tickuss was away upon Mr. Sharp's business, and Zacchary, through a grand sense of honour, would not take advantage of the chance by going in. Craft and wickedness might be in full play with them, but a wife should on no account be taken unawares, and tempted to speak outside her duty. Therefore the Carrier kissed his sister in the soft gleam of the sunset-clouds, and refusing so much as a glass of ale, touched up Dobbin with a tickle of the whip; and that excellent nag (after looking round for oats in a dream, which his common sense premised to be too sanguine) brushed all his latter elegances with his tail, and fetching round his blinkers a most sad adieu to Esther, gave a little grunt at fortune and resignedly set off. Alas, when he grunted at a light day's work, how little did he guess what unparalleled exertions parted him yet from his stable for the night! For while Master Cripps, with an equable mind, was jogging it gently on the silent way, and (thinking how lonely his cottage would be without Esther) was balancing in his mind the respective charms of his three admirers, Mary Hookham, Mealy Hiss, and Sally Brown of the Golden Cross, and sadly concluding that he must make up his mind to one of the three ere long--suddenly he beheld a thing which frightened him more than a dozen wives. Cripps was come to a turn of the track--for it scarcely could be called a road--and was sadly singing to Dobbin and himself that exquisite elegiac-- "Needles and pins, needles and pins, When a man marries, his trouble begins!" Dobbin also, though he never had been married, was trying to keep time to this tune, as he always did to sound sentiments; when the two of them saw a sight that came, like a stroke for profanity, over them. Directly in front of them, from a thick bush, sprang a beautiful girl into the middle of the lane, and spread out her hand to stop them. If the evening light had been a little paler, or even the moon had been behind her, a ghost she must have been then, and for ever. Cripps stared as if he would have no eyes any more; but Dobbin had received a great many comforts from the little hands spread out to him; and he stopped and sniffed, and lifted up his nose (now growing more decidedly aquiline) that it might be stroked, and even possibly regaled with a bunch of white-blossomed clover. "Oh, Cripps, good Cripps, you dear old Cripps!" Grace Oglander cried with great tears in her eyes, "you never have forgotten me, Zacchary Cripps? They say that I am dead and buried. It isn't true, not a word of it! Dear Cripps, I am as sound alive as you are. Only I have been shamefully treated! Do let me get up in your cart, good Cripps, and my father will thank you for ever!"