94 HIGHWAYS AND HORSES. 



quite such an accurate, account appeared in all the 

 newspapers of that day. 



These accounts go to prove the peril and the 

 hardship of a winter's journey on a four-horse coach. 

 The impression made upon the minds of all English- 

 men by the erratic changes of our delightful climate 

 must be that the clerk of the weather is a person 

 imbued with no fixity of purpose. He appears like 

 some experimentalist who is always striving after the 

 unattainable, who, when his researches are so suc- 

 cessful as to justify him in settling into a condition 

 of well-earned repose, suddenly acts in a manner 

 entirely undeserving of the good opinion we are 

 beginning to form of him. Having made every 

 one comfortable and happy, he breaks out again into 

 all manner of wild excesses, like a man who, having 

 taken the pledge and actually remained sober for a 

 month, suddenly allows his virtue to forsake him, and 

 vice once more to obtain the mastery. One day he 

 sends us insufferable heat, and the next day we are 

 almost perishing with cold. He does nothing 

 uniformly, nothing methodically. When hot weather 

 does set in, as was the case during the month devoted 

 by Londoners to the Queen's Jubilee, very frequently a 

 drought ensues, the thermometer at the same time 

 registering a heat that is positively tropical. Then, in 

 winter he errs in the opposite direction, and the shores of 

 Great Britain are, at long intervals, I admit, visited by 

 cold, the rigour and severity of which might compare 

 favourably with that which prevails on the Russian 

 steppes, or in the northern parts of our Canadian 

 dominions. 



This being the case, the sports and pastimes in 

 which the youth of England loves to indulge are 



