“
Could it be possible?—as by the match with which Stuyvesant and I lighted our cigars, we saw my watch—ten o’clock!
“Stuyvesant,” I whispered, “we are in for an adventure sure enough. I don’t know exactly where we are, but the horses are about used up, and I’m frozen.”
He turned and boldly told the party our situation, trying to make it out as a jolly good joke. The ladies did not appreciate it, except little Lucy. She did not say much, but evidently thought it a most delightful experience of romantic reality. Adelaide and Mrs. Grayson were really alarmed, and I am pretty sure that as we drove on again, I heard Cousin Daisy repeating parts of Eastman’s Snow Storm:
“But cold and dead by the sunken log,
Are they who came from the town.”
We pushed on for another half hour, which seemed a whole night time, and then pulled up before a farmhouse, in which the inmates were a long while under blankets. A rascally cur screeched and yelped at us. That, however, and our united voices calling for about ten minutes, aroused someone, for we heard a sash frostily resist lifting, and a male nightmare full voice say, “What in the devil do you want?”
Stuyvesant asked for the necessary information, and we learned that we were twelve miles from our destination and four from the nearest village. The window dropped with a bang, but the word reached me, too, something like “jam,” or “slam,” or “ram.”
“Ho! Halloo!” sang out Stuyvesant in alarm, “where in the mischief are you driving, Earnest? Here we are over the runners in a drift.”
The fact is, I had my eyes on a dark, irregular building just ahead, and I was trying to make out if it was a poorhouse or a jail.
”
”