双城记 Book1-2a The Mail
It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late inNovember, before the first of the persons with whom thishistory has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyondthe Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter's Hill. He walkeduphill in the mire by the side of the mail, as the rest of thepassengers did; not because they had the least relish forwalking exercise, under the circumstances, but because thehill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all soheavy that the horses had three times already come to a stop,beside once drawing the coach across the road, with themutinous intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins andwhip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had readthat article of war which forbad a purpose otherwise stronglyin favour of the argument, that some brute animals are enduedwith Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned totheir duty.
With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed theirway through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling hebetween whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the largejoints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them toa stand, with a wary `Wo-ho! so-ho then!' the near leaderviolently shook his head and everything upon it--like anunusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be gotup the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, thepassenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and wasdisturbed in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it hatroamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit,seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely coldmist, made its slow way through the air in ripples thatvisibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves ofan unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut outeverything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its ownworkings and a few yards of road; and the reek of thelabouring horse steamed into it, as if they had made it all.
Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up thehill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to thecheek-bones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one ofthe three could have said, from anything he saw, what eitherof the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost asmany wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes ofthe body, of his two companions. In those days, travellerswere very shy of being confidential on short notice, foranybody on the road might be a robber or in league withrobbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in `the Captain's' pay, rangingfrom the landlord to the lowest stable nondescript, it was thelikeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover mailthought to himself, that Friday night in November, onethousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering upShooter's Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch behindthe mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand onthe arm-chest before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay atthe top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on asubstratum of cutlass.
