Holdsworth was such bad company that the coachman soon ceased his “observations” touching the different scenes through which they passed, and addressed himself to his companion on the right, a young gentleman who was going as far as Chatham, and who lighted several large cigars in less than half an hour, pulling at them with hollows in his cheeks, and looking at the ash of them, and preserving a very pale face. Holdsworth had something else to think about than the coachman’s refined and classical remarks, delivered from the depth of three shawls. The quick rolling of the coach over the smooth turnpike-road was inducing an exhilaration that acted upon him as good wine acts upon the brain, giving clearness and freedom to thought, and causing life to be felt at her most secret sources. There was the impression in his mind that he had once before travelled on the top of a stage-coach along this very road, though when, or under what circumstances, or whether he had actually performed the journey or had read of some one else having done it, he could not tell. The scenery they were travelling through was altogether delicious, and better than a cordial to a man who had just landed from a three and a half months’ voyage at sea. The aspect of the country was full of that sober sweetness of general effect which soothes the heart with a deep sense of home; of broad yellow tracts burnished by the sunshine, of the delicate shadowing of green, and the neutral tint of fallow soil; houses made as dainty by distance as pictures on ivory; great trees spreading their broad abundant leaves over cool spaces of gleaming water; with the animation, now and again, of human life, where men worked in the fields, or where children sported before the houses, stopping their frolics to cheer the coach, while women held babies high in their hands and swayed to the delighted plunging of the chubby limbs.