A Tale of Two Cities-CHAPTER 2 The Mail

CHAPTER II,The Mail,It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered ¹ up Shooter's Hill. He walked uphill in the mire ² by the side of the mail, as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish ³ for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill, and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy that the horses had three times already come to a stop, beside once drawing the coach across the road, with the mutinous ⁴ intent of taking it back to Blackheath. Reins ⁵ and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, had read that article of war which forbad a purpose otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute ⁶ animals are endued ⁷ with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.,With drooping ⁸ heads and tremulous tails, they mashed ⁹ their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling he between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the large joints ¹⁰. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary ¹¹ `Wo-ho! so-ho then!' the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it--like an unusually emphatic <sup>12</sup> horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle <sup>13</sup>, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.,There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it hat roamed in its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, made its slow way through the air in ripples <sup>14</sup> that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense <sup>15</sup> enough to shut out everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings and a few yards of road; and the reek <sup>16</sup> of the labouring horse steamed into it, as if they had made it all.,Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding <sup>17</sup> up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheek-bones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers were very shy of being confidential <sup>18</sup> on short notice, for anybody on the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter, when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in `the Captain's' pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable nondescript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering ¹⁹ up Shooter's Hill, as he stood on his own particular perch ²⁰ behind the mail, beating his feet, and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols, deposited on a substratum of cutlass.,`Wo-ho!' said the coachman. `So, then One more pull and you're at the top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to it--Joe!',`Halloa' the guard replied.,`What o'clock do you make it, Joe?',`Ten minutes, good, past eleven.',`My blood' ejaculated the vexed ²³ coachman, `and not atop of Shooter's yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!',A heavy truck lumbered by. 一辆重型卡车隆隆驶过
。,I don't want my son's good name dragged through the mire.我不想使我儿子的名誉扫地。