“The very thing Scott has characterised,” I ventured to observe, “in the person of honest Dandie.”
“Begging your pardon, Sir,” said Ned, “I know Farmer Scott very well, and he’s anything but a dandy. I was just a going to bring forward, as one of the trumps, a regular out-and-outer. We become friends through an axident. It was a darkish night, you see, and him a little lushy or so, making a bit of a swerve in his going towards the middle of the road, before you could cry Snacks! I was over him with the old Regulator.”
“Good God!” exclaimed my left-hand companion on the roof. “Was not the poor fellow hurt?”
“Why, not much for HIM,” answered Ned, with a very decided emphasis on the pronoun. “Though it would have been a quietus for nine men out of ten, and, as the Jews say, Take your pick of the basket. But he looked queer at first, and shook himself, and made a wryish face, like a man that hadn’t got the exact bit of the joint he preferred.”
“Looked queer!” ejaculated the compassionate passenger, “he must have looked dreadful! I remember the Regulator, one of the oldest and heaviest vehicles on the road. But of course you picked him up, and got him inside, and——”
“Quite the reverse,” answered Ned, quietly, “and far from it; he picked himself up, quite independent, and wouldn’t even accept a lift on the box. He only felt about his head a bit, and then his back, and his arms, and his thighs, and his lines, and after that he guv a nod, and says he, ‘all right,’ and away he toddled.”
“I can’t credit it,” exclaimed the man on the roof.
“That’s jist what his wife said,” replied Ned, with considerable composure, in spite of the slur on his veracity. “Let alone two black eyes, and his collar bone, and the broke rib, he’d a hole in his head, with a flint sticking in it bigger than any one you can find since Macadaming. But he made so light on it all, and not being very clear besides in his notions, I’m blest if he didn’t tell her he’d only been knockt down by a man with a truck!”
“Not a bad story,” said the smoker on the box.
I confess I made internally a parallel remark. Naturally robust as my faith is, I could not, as Hamlet says, let “Belief lay hold of me,” with the coachman’s narrative in his hand, like a copy of a writ. I am no stranger, indeed, to the peculiar hardihood of our native yeomanry; but Ned, in his zeal for their credit, had certainly overdrawn the truth. As to his doctrine of presentiments, it had never been one of the subjects of my speculations; but on a superficial view, it appeared to me improbable that life or death, in cases of casualty, could be predetermined with such certainty as he had averred; and particularly as I happen to know a certain lady, who has been accepting the Bills of Mortality at two months’ date, for many years past—but has never honoured them when due. It was fated, however, that honest Ned was to be confirmed in his theories and corroborated in his facts.