Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity of laudanum, having
already travelled two hundred and fifty miles--viz., from a point
seventy miles beyond London. In the taking of laudanum there was
nothing extraordinary. But by accident it drew upon me the special
attention of my assessor on the box, the coachman. And in _that_
also there was nothing extraordinary. But by accident, and with great
delight, it drew my own attention to the fact that this coachman was a
monster in point of bulk, and that he had but one eye. In fact, he had
been foretold by Virgil as
"Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum."
He answered to the conditions in every one of the items:--1, a monster
he was; 2, dreadful; 3, shapeless; 4, huge; 5, who had lost an eye. But
why should _that_ delight me? Had he been one of the Calendars in
the "Arabian Nights," and had paid down his eye as the price of his
criminal curiosity, what right had _I_ to exult in his misfortune?
I did _not_ exult; I delighted in no man's punishment, though it
were even merited. But these personal distinctions (Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
identified in an instant an old friend of mine whom I had known in the
south for some years as the most masterly of mail-coachmen. He was the
man in all Europe that could (if _any_ could) have driven six-in-
hand full gallop over _Al Sirat_--that dreadful bridge of Mahomet,
with no side battlements, and of _extra_ room not enough for a
razor's edge--leading right across the bottomless gulf.
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