It was mournful enough to encounter you for the only time in this
world in this plight, and to have this glimpse of your wretched life
on lonesome Gilead Hill. What pleasure, I wonder, had she in her
life, and what pleasure have any of these hard-favored women in this
doleful region? It is pitiful to think of it. Doubtless, however,
the region isn't doleful, and the sentimental traveler would not have
felt it so if he had not encountered this funereal flitting.

But the horses are in. We mount to our places; the big doors swing
open.

"Stand away," cries the driver.

The hostler lets go Kitty's bridle, the horses plunge forward, and we
are off at a gallop, taking the opposite direction from that pursued
by old woman Larue.

This last stage is eleven miles, through a pleasanter country, and we
make it in a trifle over an hour, going at an exhilarating gait, that
raises our spirits out of the Marshy Hope level. The perfection of
travel is ten miles an hour, on top of a stagecoach; it is greater
speed than forty by rail. It nurses one's pride to sit aloft, and
rattle past the farmhouses, and give our dust to the cringing foot
tramps. There is something royal in the swaying of the coach body,
and an excitement in the patter of the horses' hoofs. And what an
honor it must be to guide such a machine through a region of rustic
admiration!

The sun has set when we come thundering down into the pretty Catholic
village of Antigonish,--the most home-like place we have seen on the