relative comfort of the coach's interior, and attempted to calculate the distance remaining. We were some hours removed from Crewkerne, where we had spent the previous day and evening, not being prone to Sunday travel;4 and should even now be breasting the long hill into Up Lyme. Was not the carriage rising? But as this very thought struck, a yet more bone-rattling shudder seized the coach's frame, as though a great beast had taken us up in its jaws and tossed us about for sport. I cried out, and was rewarded with a look of terror from my mother and a squeak of pain from Cassandra, whose hand was no doubt suffering under the effects of her companion's anxiety.
“Overturned, Mr. Austen!” the good woman cried, and half-stood as though to throw herself upon her husband's breast.
A great crash from the road ahead, and a lurching of the carriage; then the screaming of horses, and a tumult that could only be due to chaos within the traces. For the world to revolve an hundred degrees, was required but a moment; and when I found the courage to open my eyes, the floor was become the coach's ceiling. A most ludicrous position, particularly when viewed through a quantity of muslin, the result of one's skirts being tipped over one's head. I lay an instant in utter silence, feeling the rapid patter of my heart and the laboured nature of my breathing; and was relieved to find that both continued in force.
A grunt from my father roused me.
“Sir!” I cried, endeavouring to secure him amidst the murk and confusion. “May I be of assistance?”
At that, the coach's nether door was seized and opened—by the postboy, no doubt—and my father, whose main support the door had been, tumbled from the vehicle. Hardly a dignified antic for a clergyman of three-and-seventy, but followed by the still less-seemly exit of his younger daughter, her skirts in a tangle about her knees. The relief, however, at being freed from such a world gone topsy-turvy, was beyond every indecorous attempt to achieve it; I drew a shaky breath and tested my limbs, heedless of the fierce rain that pelted my cap. My father, having been helped to his feet by the postboy (a burly fellow of some five-and-thirty, one Hibbs by name), was seized with a coughing fit. The poor man's senses were little assisted when Hibbs thought to pound upon his back, and I hastened to intervene.
“Father,” I said, taking him by the arm, “I trust you are not injured in any way?”
“Only in complaisance, my dear,” he replied, with the ghost of a smile, “and that has been decidedly shaken. I shall be forced to attend your mother's every warning, by and by—a triumph, I fear, that she shall not know how to sustain.”
My mother! I turned in an instant, and peered back within the carriage's depths—and oh! What a scene I then descried!
My beloved sister lay wan and lifeless, in a heap of crushed muslin against the coach's farthest wall—the wall that had received all the force of impact in the conveyance's upheaval. My mother was attempting to shift Cassandra towards the open door—which, given the tossing of the coach, was well above her head; but the poor woman lacked the strength for it, and was reduced to tears as a consequence.
“Stay, madam,” I cried, and leapt for the postboy.
The man Hibbs saw the necessity in a moment; and lifted Cassandra to safety so swiftly and gently that I was all but struck speechless; the condition of the poor sufferer being of paramount importance, however, I offered broken thanks and turned to her comfort, overcome by nameless dread. So much lively beauty, reduced to deathly silence! It was not to be borne. My beloved sister was carried to the shelter of a tree, and my father's cloak propped on a few sticks above her, in an ineffectual attempt to shield her from the rain.
My mother's wails declared her incapable of use; my father was consigned to comfort her; and 1 turned to Cassandra to see what ill I might find.
A great bruise overspread her temple, and in feeling about her scalp, I was rewarded by a grimace of pain flitting across her countenance, and a warm trickle of blood upon my fingertips. I chafed her wrists, and called her name; implored her, in desperation, to awake; but she continued insensible, lying at the verge of the road like so much cast-off clothing. The horror that