A mile ayont Dundee,"
before I ever had set my eyes upon her.
"Can she carry us?" said I, pausing irresolutely, with my foot on the rough heavy runner of the cutter.
"I guess she can," quoth he. "She will skim like a bird over the snow; so get into the sleigh, and we will go straight off to the singing-school."
It was intensely cold. I drew the collar of my great-coat over my ears, and wrapped my half of the bull's hide well round my feet, and we started. The old mare went better than could have been expected from such a skeleton of a beast. To be sure, she had no weight of flesh to encumber her motions, and we were getting on pretty well, when the music master drove too near a stump, which suddenly upset us both, and tumbled him head foremost into a bank of snow. I fortunately rolled out a-top of him, and soon extricated myself from the difficulty; but I found it no easy matter to drag my ponderous companion from beneath the snow, and the old bull's hide in which he was completely enveloped.
The old mare stood perfectly still, gazing with her one eye intently on the mischief she had done, as if she never had been guilty of such a breach of manners before. After shaking the snow from our garments, and getting all right for a second start, my companion exclaimed in an agonized tone--
"My fiddle! Where, where is my fiddle? I can do nothing without my fiddle."
We immediately went in search of it; but we did not succeed in finding it for some time. I had given it up in despair, and, half-frozen with cold, was stepping into the cutter to take the benefit of the old bull's hide, when, fortunately for the music master one of the strings of the lost instrument snapped with the cold. We followed the direction of the sound, and soon beheld the poor fiddle sticking in a snow-bank, and concealed by a projecting stump. The instrument had sustained no other injury than the loss of three of the strings.
"Well, arn't that too bad?" says he. "I have no more catgut without sending to W---. That's done for, at least for to-night."
"It's very cold," I cried, impatiently, seeing that he was in no hurry to move on. "Do let us be going. You can examine your instrument better in the house than standing up to your knees in the snow."