STAGE-COACH VIEWS. 
21 
A strict regard for truth obliges us to say, that the few 
women whom we saw that day looked exceedingly 
pinched up. They had prominent chins and noses, hav¬ 
ing lost all their teeth, and a sharp W would represent 
their profile. They were not so well preserved as their 
husbands; or perchance they were well preserved as 
dried specimens. (Their husbands, however, were pic¬ 
kled.) But we respect them not the less for all that; our 
own dental system is far from perfect. 
Still w^e kept on in the rain, or, if we stopped, it was 
commonly at a post-office, and we thought that writing 
letters, and sorting them against our arrival, must be the 
principal employment of the inhabitants of the Cape, 
this rainy day. The Post-office appeared a singularly do¬ 
mestic institution here. Ever and anon the stage stopped 
before some low shop or dwelling, and a wheelwright 
or shoemaker appeared in his shirt sleeves and leather 
apron, with spectacles newly donned, holding up Uncle 
Sam’s bag, as if it were a slice of home-made cake, for 
the travellers, while he retailed some piece of gossip to 
the driver, really as indifferent to the presence of the 
former as if they were so much baggage. In one in¬ 
stance, we understood that a woman was the post-mis¬ 
tress, and they said that she made the best one on the 
road; but we suspected that the letters must be sub¬ 
jected to a very close scrutiny there. While we were 
stopping, for this purpose, at Dennis, we ventured to put 
our heads out of the windows, to see where we were 
going, and saw rising before us, through the mist, singu¬ 
lar barren hills, all stricken with poverty-grass, looming 
up as if they were in the horizon, though they were close 
to us, and we seemed to have got to the end of the land 
on that side, notwithstanding that the horses were still 
