With that peculiar voice Heard only from Hog’s Norton throats and noses, Miss G., with Perdita, was making choice Of buds and blossoms for her summer posies, When coming to that line, where Proserpine Lets fall her flowers from the wain of Dis; Imagine this-- Uprose on his hind legs old Farmer Grayley, Grunting this question for the club’s digestion, “Do _Dis’s Waggon_ go from the Ould Bäaley?” [Illustration] THE ACCIDENT. “We thought she never would ride it out, and expected her every moment to go to pieces.”--NAVAL SKETCH BOOK. “THERE you go, you villain--that’s the way to run over people! There’s a little boy in the road--you’d better run over _him_, for you won’t call out to him, no, not you, for a brute as you are! You think poor people an’t common Christians,--you grind the faces of the poor, you do. Ay, cut away, do--you’ll be Wilful Murdered by the Crowner some day! I’ll keep up with you and tell the gentlemen on the top! Women wasn’t created for you to gallop over like dirt, and scrunch their bones into compound fractions.--Don’t get into his coach, Ma’am! he’s no respect for the sects--he’ll lay you up in the hospital for months and months, he will, the inhuman hard-hearted varmin!” The speaker, a little active old woman, had run parallel with the coach some fifty yards, when it stopped to take up a lady who was as prompt as ladies generally are, in giving dinner instructions to the cook, and setting domestic lessons to the housemaid, besides having to pack a parcel, to hunt for her clogs, to exchange the cook’s umbrella for her own, and to kiss all her seven children. Mat, thus reduced to a door-mat, was unable to escape the volley which the Virago still poured in upon him; but he kept a most imperturbable face and silence till he was fairly seated again on the box. “There, gentlemen,” said he, pointing at the assailant with his whip; “that’s what I call gratitude. Look at her figure now, and look at what it was six months ago. She never had a waist till I run over her.” “I hope, friend, thee art not very apt to make these experiments on the human figure,” said an elderly Quaker on the roof. “Not by no means,” answered Mat; “I have done very little in the accidental line--nothing worth mentioning. All the years I’ve been on the road, I’ve never come to a kill on the spot; them sort o’things belongs to Burrowes, as drives over one with the Friend in Need, and he’s got quite a name for it. He’s called ‘Fatal Jack.’ To be sure, now I think of it, I was the innocent cause of death to one person, and she was rather out of the common.” “You fractured her limbs, p’r’aps?” inquired one of the outsides. “No such thing,” said Mat, “there was nothing fractious in the case; as to running over her limbs, it was the impossible thing with a woman born without legs and arms.” “You must allude to Miss Biffin,” said the outsider--“the Norfolk phenomenon.”