With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way
through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if
they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the
driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary "Wo-ho!
so-ho-then!" the near leader violently shook his head and everything
upon it- like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach
could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the
passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed
in mind.
There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in
its forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and
finding none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way
through the air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one
another, as the waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense
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 of the
labouring horses steamed into it, as if they had made it all.