Merrily, therefore, he set forth, with a sturdy rider on his back; his clear neigh rang through the thick dull streets, and kind people came to their white blurred windows, and exclaimed, as they glanced at the party-colored horseman rushing away into the dreary depths, “Well, rather him than me, thank God!” “You keep the dog,” Master Jordas had said to the hostler, before he left the yard; “he is like a lamb, when you come to know him. I can't be plagued with him to-night. Here's a half crown for his victuals; he eats precious little for the size of him. A bullock's liver every other day, and a pound and a half the between times. Don't be afeared of him. He looks like that, to love you, man.” Instead of keeping on the Durham side of Tees, as he would have done in fair weather for the first six miles or so, Jordas crossed by the old town bridge into his native county. The journey would be longer thus, but easier in some places, and the track more plain to follow, which on a snowy night was everything. For all things now were in one indiscriminate pelt and whirl of white; the Tees was striped with rustling floes among the black moor-water; and the trees, as long as there were any, bent their shrouded forms and moaned. But with laborious plunges, and broad scatterings of obstruction, the willing horse ploughed out his way, himself the while wrapped up in white, and caked in all his tufty places with a crust that flopped up and down. The rider, himself piled up with snow, and bearded with a berg of it, from time to time, with his numb right hand, fumbled at the frozen clouts that clogged the poor horse's mane and crest. “How much longer will a' go, I wonder?” said Jordas to himself for the twentieth time. “The Lord in heaven knows where we be; but horse knows better than the Lord a'most. Two hour it must be since ever I 'tempted to make head or tail of it. But Marmaduke knoweth when a' hath his head; these creatures is wiser than Christians. Save me from the witches, if I ever see such weather! And I wish that Master Lance's oysters wasn't quite so much like him.” For, broad as his back was, perpetual thump of rugged and flintified knobs and edges, through the flag basket strapped over his neck, was beginning to tell upon his stanch but jolted spine; while his foot in the northern stirrup was numbed, and threatening to get frost-bitten. “The Lord knoweth where we be,” he said once more, growing in piety as the peril grew. “What can old horse know, without the Lord hath told 'un? And likely he hath never asked, no more than I did. We mought 'a come twelve moiles, or we mought 'a come no more than six. What ever is there left in the world to judge by? The hills, or the hollows, or the boskies, all is one, so far as the power of a man's eyes goes. Howsomever, drive on, old Dukie.”