The Adventures of Harry Rochester: A Tale of the Days of Marlborough and Eugene (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Adventures of Harry Rochester: A Tale of the Days of Marlborough and Eugene

Stap me, Frank, if ever I rattle my old bones over these roads again! Every joint in me aches; every wrinkle and I've too many - is filled with dust; and my wig plague on it, Frank, my wig's a doormat. Look at it - whew!

My lord Godolphin took off his cocked hat, removed his full periwig, and Shook it over the side of the calash, wrying his lips as the horse of one of his escort started at the sudden cloud. My lord had good excuse for his petulance. It was a brilliant june day, in a summer of glorious weather, and the Wiltshire roads, no better nor worse than other English highways in the year 1702, were thick with white dust, which the autumn rains would by and by transform into the stickiest of clinging mud. The Lord High Treasurer, as he lay back wearily on his cushions, looked, with his lean, lined, swarthy face and close-cropt grizzled poll, every day of his fifty-eight years. He was returning with his son Francis, now nearly twenty three, from a visit to his estates in Cornwall. Had he been a younger man he would no doubt have ridden his own horse; had he been of lower rank he might have travelled by the public coach; but being near sixty, a baron, and lord of the Treasury to boot, he drove in his private four-horsed calash, with two red-coated postilions, and four sturdy liveried henchmen on horseback, all well armed against the perils of footpads and highwaymen.

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