I.
Having made up my mind to go down to Yarmouth, I went round to the coach office and took the box seat on the mail. In the evening I started, by that conveyance, down the road.
Charles Dickens.
"Don't you think that a very remarkable sky?" I asked the coachman, in the first stage out of London. "I don't remember to have seen one like it."
"Nor I—not equal to it," he replied. "That's wind, sir; there'll be mischief done at sea, I expect before long."
It was a murky confusion—here and there blotted with a color like the color of the smoke from damp fuel—of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. There had been wind all day; and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much increased, and the sky was more overcast, and it blew harder.
But as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow harder and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face the wind. Many times in the dark part of the night (it was then late in September, when the nights were not short) the leaders turned about, or came to a dead stop; and we were often in apprehension that the coach would be blown over.