it was just as well we did not know what the road we were travelling was like. For when we had been toiling along for about half an hour, damp and shivering in spite of the rugs, Newman suddenly brought the horses to a dead stop, and handing me the reins, jumped down and went to the pole.
He was so extremely cautious in his movements that uneasiness took possession of me and I leaned forward and anxiously scrutinised the horses to see what was wrong. Just then the fog lifted a little, enough to show us that the road took a sharp curve immediately ahead, and that we were on the edge of a precipice that seemed to be bottomless, while the hill rose like a wall above us on the other side. We were on a steep incline, one of the traces had broken, and to get at it Newman must somehow get under and between those high-spirited, nervous creatures without startling them, for one plunge would send coach and all flying over the edge into space! There was not a man in sight, and he was speaking so gently while he soothed and patted them that he evidently thought it was not safe to call out. I asked him if I should get down and go to their heads, but he said that that would probably only make them more restive, and that all we could do was to keep perfectly still and be careful not to make a sound if they moved forward.
For ten long, long minutes we sat there, perched high up above those five beauties on whose movements our lives depended. The tension was pretty bad while it lasted, and when Newman with infinite patience and a great many foiled attempts had at last picked up the dropped trace and cleverly contrived to attach it again, Mrs Greendays could no longer restrain a little sign of it. She gave a choky, hysterical little laugh, and said brokenly,
“Oh Mary, which do you think would have been worst,—to have tumbled headlong over the cliff, horses and coach and all together, or been thrown off the coach as we would have been if they had taken it into their pretty heads to dash forward round that corner, or to have gone backwards downhill, when the horses I suppose, would have been on top of us long before we got to the bottom?”
“I don’t think we would have known anything at all about it if any one of the three had happened!” I answered soberly.
After we had picked up the men we went at a rattling pace down the hill and were very soon in the lowlands again, but the rain had set in, and though it was not so bitterly cold once we were off the heights, a steady drizzle, and sometimes more than that, went on all day. The bush we travelled through was lovely, with a wonderful wealth and variety of ferns, creepers, and mosses. There were very few flowers, excepting the friendly manuka and a little white convolvulus here and there, but the fern-fronds varied in colour from bronze to a deep claret-red, with a thousand shades of green, yellow, and coppery colour in between, and the tree-fern, and foliage of the shrubs and vines included every verdant tint from lily-white to the deep, sombre hue of the pines. There was strangely little sign of life, though, and we did not meet a single person or
