For the first few minutes I thought I must have fainted from the intolerable sensation of smothering which I experienced. However, the leathers having been removed, and a little more air obtained, I took heart of grace, and resigned myself to my fate. Away wallopped the four horses, trotting with their front and galloping with their hind legs; and away went we after them, bumping, thumping, jumping, jolting, shaking, tossing, and tumbling, over the wickedest road, I do think the cruellest hard-heartedest road, that ever wheel rumbled upon. Thorough bog and marsh, and ruts wider and deeper than any christian ruts I ever saw, with the roots of trees protruding across our path; their boughs every now and then giving us an affectionate scratch through the windows; and, more than once, a half-demolished trunk or stump lying in the middle of the road lifting us up, and letting us down again, with most awful variations of our poor coach body from its natural position. Bones of me! what a road![25] Even my father's solid proportions could not keep their level, but were jerked up to the roof and down again every three minutes. Our companions seemed nothing dismayed by these wondrous performances of a coach and four, but laughed and talked incessantly, the young ladies, at the very top of their voices, and with the national nasal twang.[26] The conversation was much of the _genteel_ shopkeeper kind; the wit of the ladies, and the gallantry of the gentlemen, savouring strongly of tapes and yard measures, and the shrieks of laughter of the whole set enough to drive one into a frenzy. The ladies were all pretty; two of them particularly so, with delicate fair complexions, and beautiful grey eyes: how I wish they could have held their tongues for two minutes! We had not long been in the coach before one of them complained of being dreadfully sick.[27] This, in such a space, and with seven near neighbours! Fortunately she was near the window; and during our whole fourteen miles of purgatory she alternately leaned from it overcome with sickness, then reclined languishingly in the arms of her next neighbour, and then, starting up with amazing vivacity, joined her voice to the treble duet of her two pretty companions, with a superiority of shrillness that might have been the pride and envy of Billingsgate. 'Twas enough to bother a rookery! The country through which we passed was woodland, flat, and without variety, save what it derived from the wondrous richness and brilliancy of the autumnal foliage. Here indeed decay is beautiful; and nature appears more gorgeously clad in this her fading mantle, than in all the summer's flush of bloom in our less-favoured climates.[28] I noted several beautiful wild flowers growing among the underwood; some of which I have seen adorning with great dignity our most cultivated gardens.[29] None of the trees had any size or appearance of age: they are the second growth, which have sprung from the soil once possessed by