The country had for some time back been changing in character.

By a thousand indications I could judge that I was again drawing near to Scotland.

I saw it written in the face of the hills, in the growth of the trees, and in the glint of the waterbrooks that kept the high-road company.

It might have occurred to me, also, that I was, at the same time, approaching a place of some fame in Britain--Gretna Green.

Over these same leagues of road--which Rowley and I now traversed in the claret-coloured chaise, to the note of the flageolet and the French lesson--how many pairs of lovers had gone bowling northwards to the music of sixteen scampering horseshoes; and how many irate persons, parents, uncles, guardians, evicted rivals, had come tearing after, clapping the frequent red face to the chaise-window, lavishly shedding their gold about the post-houses, sedulously loading and re-loading, as they went, their avenging pistols! But I doubt if I had thought of it at all, before a wayside hazard swept me into the thick of an adventure of this nature; and I found myself playing providence with other people's lives, to my own admiration at the moment--and subsequently to my own brief but passionate regret.
At rather an ugly corner of an uphill reach I came on the wreck of a chaise lying on one side in the ditch, a man and a woman in animated discourse in the middle of the road, and the two postillions, each with his pair of horses, looking on and laughing from the saddle.
'Morning breezes! here's a smash!' cried Rowley, pocketing his flageolet in the middle of the _Tight Little Island_.
I was perhaps more conscious of the moral smash than the physical--more alive to broken hearts than to broken chaises; for, as plain as the sun at morning, there was a screw loose in this runaway match.