“Then why stay there, sir?” says Corney, “when we've room on the car for you, and the garron impatient to be going!”
“Look at the water,” said the gentleman; “how am I to wade through it?”
“Is it wade?—Faith! then, you'll have to swim soon! But take your choice, sir:—I won't persuade you one way or another.”
“Where am I?” says the gentleman.
“Where are you!—Why, then, look at the side of the stone, and you'll see, cut in legible letters, nine miles from anywhere and no mile-stone in the world ever spoke truer. Was it to gratify impertinent curiosity, do you think, that Henniker put up the stone?—Not himself, then!—Mad as he was, he knew that it would be quite enough to make any man move on to be tould he was nine miles from anywhere!—What more did you want? Would you have him keep a horse ready saddled, waiting 'till you'd come?”
“My mare has thrown me and ran away,” said the gentleman; “and I merely got on the stone, so that I might shelter myself and my dog, from head to foot, until some one came by, or the rain ceased.”
“Ceased!” exclaimed Corney, bursting into a laugh; “if you waited for that, sir, you'd stay till the crows removed you as a nuisance to the frogs in the slush there behind. Does it ever cease?—Divil a bit, then, for three miles round, morning, noon, or night,—summer or winter,—but keeps pelting and pattering away, at all times and in all seasons, as it has for hundreds of years, and will for ever and ever except once in a twelvemonth, sometimes, and that's the fifteenth day of the month of July, when St. Swithin is too busy raining down upon the other parts of the world, to mind this which is his watery worship's home. It's fine weather here, if, with three coats on your back, you don't get wet to the skin in forty minutes. I wouldn't insult the Saint, by carrying an umbrella, for Damer's estate! Bad luck and ill chance is the best I'd expect, and so may you; for it's raining now just worse than ever I knew it but once. Had you no idea, then, where you were, sir?”
“I had,” says the gentleman; “but I wasn't sure. I never came by this road to The Beg before; and I asked the boy that's with you where I was, when I met him hereabouts, full two hours ago; but he grinned in my face.”
“Is it yourself that bate him, bekase he couldn't understand English?”
“I certainly did lay my whip over his shoulders,” says the gentleman; “and the young villain then began to pelt me and my mare with stones, so that the animal feared to approach near enough to permit of my beating him again; and at last she got unmanageable, ran away, and threw me off,—that is, I mean—threw me off, and ran away.”