The carriage, I thought, was a fac-simile of the one in which I had been
brought from West Wallen on the night of my arrival. One of the most
striking peculiarities of this sort of vehicle was the width at which the
wheels were set apart. The body seemed comparatively narrow. It was very
long, and covered with white canvas. It had neither windows nor doors,
but just the one guarded opening in front. There were no steps leading to
this, and, indeed, a variety of obstacles before it. And the way Grandma
effected an entrance was to put a chair on a mound of earth, and a
cricket on top of the chair, and thus, having climbed up to Fanny's
reposeful back, she slipped passively down, feet foremost, to the
whiffle-tree; from thence she easily gained the plane of the carriage
floor.
Grandpa and I took a less circuitous, though, perhaps, not less difficult
route.
I sat with Grandpa on the "front" seat--it may be remarked that the
"front" seat was very much front, and the "back" seat very much
back--there was a kind of wooden shelf built outside as a resting-place
for the feet, so that while our heads were under cover, our feet were
out, utterly exposed to the weather, and we must either lay them on the
shelf or let them hang off into space.
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