A WORD-PICTURE 185 



' Yolio, past hedges, gates, and trees ; past 

 cottages and barns, and people going home from 

 work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into 

 the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, 

 whipped up at a Ijound upon the little watercourse, 

 and held by struggling carters close to the five- 

 barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow 

 turning in the road. Yoho, by churches dropped 

 down by themselves in quiet nooks, with rustic 

 burial-grounds about them, where graves are green, 

 and daisies sleep — for it is evening — on the bosoms 

 of the dead. Yoho, past streams in which the cattle 

 cool their feet, and where the rushes grow ; past 

 paddock-fences, farms and rick-yards ; past last year's 

 stacks, cut slice by slice away, and showing in tlie 

 wanino' lio-ht like ruined o;ables, old and brown. 

 Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry 

 water-splash, and up at a canter to the level road 

 ao^ain. Yoho ! Yoho ! ' 



Quite so. And an excellent picture of the 

 coaching age, although ' Yoho ! ' smacks too much 

 of the sea for a coach. In his haste he wrote that 

 word w^hen he surely meant ' Tallyho ! ' Nor is this 

 a correct portrait of the Exeter Road by any manner 

 of means. Dickens, usually so precise in topo- 

 graphical details, has generalised here. A true and 

 stirring picture of country roads in general, there 

 are farms, and villages, and churches all too many 

 for this highway. It should have been ' Yoho ! 

 across the bleak and barren down. Yoho ! by the 

 blasted oak on the lonely common,' and so forth, 

 so far as Andover, at any rate. And what was that 



