“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.”

“Begging your pardon,” said Mat, “it was before the Phenomenon was started. It was one of the regular old long-bodied double-coaches, and I drove it myself. Very uneasy they were; for springs at that time hadn’t much spring in ’em; and nobody on earth had thought of Macadaming Piccadilly. You could always tell whether you were on the stones, or off, and no mistake. I was a full hour behind time—for coaches in them days wasn’t called by such names as Chronometers and Regulators, and good reason why. So I’d been plying a full hour after time, without a soul inside, except a barrel of natives for a customer down the road: at last, a hackney-coach pulls up, and Jarvey and the waterman lifts Miss Biffin into my drag. Well, off I sets with a light load enough, and to fetch up time astonished my team into a bit of a gallop—and it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to keep one’s seat on the box, the coach jumped so over the stones. Well, away I goes, springing my rattle till I come to the gate at Hyde Park Corner, where one of my insides was waiting for me—and not very sorry to pull up, for the breath was almost shook out of my bellows. Well, I opens the door, and what do I see lying together at the bottom of the coach, but Miss Biffin bruised unsensible, and the head out of the barrel of oysters!”

“I do hope, friend,” said the elderly Quaker, “that thou didst replace them on their seats.”

“To be sure I did,” answered Mat, “and the oysters took it quietly enough, without opening their mouths; but it didn’t go quite so smooth with Miss B. She talked of an action for damages, and consulted counsel; but, Lord bless you, when it came to taking steps agin us, she hadn’t a leg to stand upon!”