huckaback know quite how detestable huckaback is to roll--and the shop

would be dusty and, perhaps, the governor about and snappy. And here was

quiet and greenery, and one mucked about as the desire took one,

without a soul to see, and here was no wailing of "Sayn," no folding of

remnants, no voice to shout, "Hoopdriver, forward!" And once he almost

ran over something wonderful, a little, low, red beast with a yellowish

tail, that went rushing across the road before him. It was the first

weasel he had ever seen in his cockney life. There were miles of this,

scores of miles of this before him, pinewood and oak forest, purple,

heathery moorland and grassy down, lush meadows, where shining rivers

wound their lazy way, villages with square-towered, flint churches,

and rambling, cheap, and hearty inns, clean, white, country towns, long

downhill stretches, where one might ride at one's ease (overlooking a

jolt or so), and far away, at the end of it all,--the sea.

What mattered a fly or so in the dawn of these delights? Perhaps he had

been dashed a minute by the shameful episode of the Young Lady in Grey,

and perhaps the memory of it was making itself a little lair in a corner

of his brain from which it could distress him in the retrospect by

suggesting that he looked like a fool; but for the present that trouble

was altogether in abeyance. The man in drab--evidently a swell--had

spoken to him as his equal, and the knees of his brown suit and the

chequered stockings were ever before his eyes. (Or, rather, you could

see the stockings by carrying the head a little to one side.) And to

feel, little by little, his mastery over this delightful, treacherous

machine, growing and growing! Every half-mile or so his knees reasserted

The Wheels of Chance