The moon now rides in unsullied glory through the azure sky. We top Alconbury Hill at a few minutes to twelve, and come to the junction of the Old North and the Great North Roads. Everything stands out as clearly as if it were daylight, but with a certain ghost-like and uncanny effect. “The obelisk,” as the coachmen have learned to call the great milestone at the junction of the roads (it is really a square pedestal) looks particularly spectral, but is not the airy nothing it seems--as the coachman on the Edinburgh Mail discovered, a little while ago. The guard tells us all about it. The usual thing. Too much to drink at the hospitable bar of the “George,” at Huntingdon, and a doubt as to which of the two milestones he saw, on coming up the road, was the real one. The guard and all the outsides were in similar case--it was Christmas, and men made merry--and so there was nothing for it but to try their quality. Unfortunately, he drove into the real stone, and not its spectral duplicate, conjured up by the effects of strong liquors. We see the broken railings and the dismounted stone ball that once capped the thing as we pass. The local surgeon mended the resultant broken limbs at the “Wheatsheaf,” whose lighted windows fall into our wake as we commence the descent of Stonegate Hill. Stilton. By this time we are too drowsy to note whether we changed at the “Bell” or at its rival, directly opposite, the “Angel.” At any rate, nobody asks us if we would not like a nice real Stilton cheese to take with us, as they usually do: it is midnight. We now pass Norman Cross, and come in another eight miles to Wansford turnpike, where the gate is closed and the pikeman gone to bed. “Blow up for the gate,” said the coachman, when we were drawing near, to the guard, who blew his horn accordingly; but it does not seem to have disturbed the dreams of the janitor. “Gate, gate!” cry the guard and coachman in stentorian chorus. The guard himself descends, and blows a furious series of blasts in the doorway, while the coachman lashes the casement windows. [Illustration: THE TURNPIKE GATE. _From a contemporary lithograph._ ] At last a shuffling and fumbling are heard within, and the door is opened. The pikeman has not been to bed after all; he was, and is, only drunk, and had fallen into a sottish sleep. He now opens the gate, in the midst of much disinterested advice from both our officials--the guard advising him to stick to Old Tom and leave brandy alone, and the coachman pointing out that the Mail will be down presently and that he had better leave the gate open if he does not wish to present the Postmaster-General with forty shillings, that being the penalty to which a pike-keeper is liable who does not leave a clear passage for His Majesty’s Mails. We now cross Wansford Bridge, a very long and narrow stone structure over the river Nene. Having done so, slowly and with caution, we know no more: sleep descends insensibly upon us.