attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who
knew it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and
color of heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were
distorted by harness and drudgery from colthood--though if all had
their rights, he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been
picking the herbage of some Eastern plain instead of tugging here--
had trodden this road almost daily for twenty years. Even his
subjection was not made congruous throughout, for the harness
being too short, his tail was not drawn through the crupper, so
that the breeching slipped awkwardly to one side. He knew every
subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of ground between
Hintock and Sherton Abbas--the market-town to which he journeyed--
as accurately as any surveyor could have learned it by a Dumpy
level.

The vehicle had a square black tilt which nodded with the motion
of the wheels, and at a point in it over the driver's head was a
hook to which the reins were hitched at times, when they formed a
catenary curve from the horse's shoulders. Somewhere about the
axles was a loose chain, whose only known purpose was to clink as
it went. Mrs. Dollery, having to hop up and down many times in
the service of her passengers, wore, especially in windy weather,
short leggings under her gown for modesty's sake, and instead of a
bonnet a felt hat tied down with a handkerchief, to guard against
an earache to which she was frequently subject. In the rear of
the van was a glass window, which she cleaned with her pocket-
handkerchief every market-day before starting. Looking at the van
from the back, the spectator could thus see through its interior a
square piece of the same sky and landscape that he saw without,
but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers, who, as