As they came out into the garden the mists and rain swam all about them and closed them in. The wind beat their faces, caught their coats and lashed them against their legs, and went scrambling away round the corners of the hill. “My word! what a day!” shouted Tony. “Here’s a day for a wedding!” He was tremendously excited. He even thought that he liked this wind and rain, it helped on the adventure; and then, too, there would be less people about, but it would be a stormy drive to the church. They secured a cab in the market-place. But such a cab; was there ever another like it? It stood, for no especial reason it seemed, there in front of the tower, with the rain whirling round it, the wind beating at the horse’s legs and playing fantastic tricks with the driver’s cape, which flew about his head up and down like an angry bird. He was the very oldest aged man Time had ever seen; his beard, a speckly grey, fell raggedly down on to his chest, his eyes were bleared and nearly closed, his nose, swollen to double its natural size, was purple in colour, and when he opened his mouth there was visible an enormous tooth, but one only. His hands trembled with ague as he clutched the reins and addressed his miserable beast. The horse was a pitiful scarecrow; its ribs, like a bent towel-rack, almost pierced the skin; its eye was melancholy but patient. The cab itself moved as though at any moment it would fall to pieces. The sides of the carriage were dusty, and the wheels were thick with mud; at every movement the windows screamed and rattled and shook with age—the cabman, the four-wheeler and the horse lurched together from side to side. However, there was really nothing else. Time was precious, and it certainly couldn’t be wasted in going round to the cab-stand at the other end of the town. On a fine day there would have been a whole row of them in the market-place, but in weather like this they sought better shelter. The wind whistled across the cobbles; the rain fell with such force that it hit the stones and leaped up again. The aged man was murmuring to himself the same words again and again. “Eh! Lor! how the rain comes down; it’s terrible bad for the beasts.” The tower frowned down on them all. Tony jumped in, there was nothing else to be done; it rattled across the square. Tony was laughing. It all seemed to him to add to the excitement. “Do you know,” he said, “James Stephens’s poem? It hits it off exactly;” and he quoted: “The driver rubbed at his nettly chin, With a huge, loose forefinger, crooked and black, And his wobbly violent lips sucked in, And puffed out again and hung down slack: One fang shone through his lop-sided smile, In his little pouched eye flickered years of guile.