slowly along with a slouching driver cracking his whip beside the horses.  She waited for it, thinking that if the waggoner were not a very sour-looking man, she would ask him to take her up.  As the waggon approached her, the driver had fallen behind, but there was something in the front of the big vehicle which encouraged her.  At any previous moment in her life she would not have noticed it, but now, the new susceptibility that suffering had awakened in her caused this object to impress her strongly.  It was only a small white-and-liver-coloured spaniel which sat on the front ledge of the waggon, with large timid eyes, and an incessant trembling in the body, such as you may have seen in some of these small creatures.  Hetty cared little for animals, as you know, but at this moment she felt as if the helpless timid creature had some fellowship with her, and without being quite aware of the reason, she was less doubtful about speaking to the driver, who now came forward—­a large ruddy man, with a sack over his shoulders, by way of scarf or mantle.

“Could you take me up in your waggon, if you’re going towards Ashby?” said Hetty.  “I’ll pay you for it.”

“Aw,” said the big fellow, with that slowly dawning smile which belongs to heavy faces, “I can take y’ up fawst enough wi’out bein’ paid for’t if you dooant mind lyin’ a bit closish a-top o’ the wool-packs.  Where do you coom from?  And what do you want at Ashby?”

“I come from Stoniton.  I’m going a long way—­to Windsor.”

“What!  Arter some service, or what?”

“Going to my brother—­he’s a soldier there.”

“Well, I’m going no furder nor Leicester—­and fur enough too—­but I’ll take you, if you dooant mind being a bit long on the road.  Th’ hosses wooant feel your weight no more nor they feel the little doog there, as I puck up on the road a fortni’t agoo.  He war lost, I b’lieve, an’s been all of a tremble iver sin’.  Come, gi’ us your basket an’ come behind and let me put y’ in.”

To lie on the wool-packs, with a cranny left between the curtains of the awning to let in the air, was luxury to Hetty now, and she half-slept away the hours till the driver came to ask her if she wanted to get down and have “some victual”; he himself was going to eat his dinner at this “public.”  Late at night they reached Leicester, and so this second day of Hetty’s journey was past.  She had spent no money except what she had paid for her food, but she felt that this slow journeying would be intolerable for her another day, and in the morning she found her way to a coach-office to ask about the road to Windsor, and see if it would cost her too much to go part of the distance by coach again.  Yes!  The distance was too great—­the coaches were too dear—­she must give them up; but the elderly clerk at the office, touched by her pretty anxious face, wrote down for her the names of the chief places she must pass through.  This was the only comfort she got in Leicester, for