Leaving our neat inn and our pretty hostess after breakfast the following morning, we struggled on through the quagmire roads as we best might, sometimes waiting whilst the servant rode on ahead to fathom the depth of any very threatening bog before we ventured into it, but generally trusting to good driving and stout horses to pull us through. A bridge over the South Esk had a toll-house and gate upon it, and this would have been a pleasant scrap of Old-World ways had the road in the vicinity been worth paying for; but as, on the contrary, it appeared to me that we deserved rather a handsome premium for enduring the risk and misery it involved, the charge seemed adding insult to injury.

The snow, which lay thick and white along the higher ridges, gave a piercing keenness to the bleak southerly wind, as it blew aside cloaks and shawls and furs; the poor children looked pinched with cold, through all their mufflings, and we were glad to sit by the inn fire to thaw, when we stopped for a few minutes at Westbury, a watery, dreary, muddy place, and the coldest part of the island I have yet visited.

The roads became gradually but evidently worse as we approached the forest. Often I thought we must relinquish the idea of taking the car further, and travel on upon the horses in the best way we could, but still we advanced, and before evening reached Deloraine, on the river Meander.