The Sphynx was a Sphynx no more!  The fountains of her great deep were broken up, and she rained the nine parts of speech forty days and forty nights, metaphorically speaking, and buried us under a desolating deluge of trivial gossip that left not a crag or pinnacle of rejoinder projecting above the tossing waste of dislocated grammar and decomposed pronunciation!

How we suffered, suffered, suffered!  She went on, hour after hour, till I was sorry I ever opened the mosquito question and gave her a start.  She never did stop again until she got to her journey’s end toward daylight; and then she stirred us up as she was leaving the stage (for we were nodding, by that time), and said: 

“Now you git out at Cottonwood, you fellers, and lay over a couple o’ days, and I’ll be along some time to-night, and if I can do ye any good by edgin’ in a word now and then, I’m right thar.  Folks’ll tell you’t I’ve always ben kind o’ offish and partic’lar for a gal that’s raised in the woods, and I am, with the rag-tag and bob-tail, and a gal has to be, if she wants to be anything, but when people comes along which is my equals, I reckon I’m a pretty sociable heifer after all.”

We resolved not to “lay by at Cottonwood.”

CHAPTER III.

About an hour and a half before daylight we were bowling along smoothly over the road—­so smoothly that our cradle only rocked in a gentle, lulling way, that was gradually soothing us to sleep, and dulling our consciousness—­when something gave away under us!  We were dimly aware of it, but indifferent to it.  The coach stopped.  We heard the driver and conductor talking together outside, and rummaging for a lantern, and swearing because they could not find it—­but we had no interest in whatever had happened, and it only added to our comfort to think of those people out there at work in the murky night, and we snug in our nest with the curtains drawn.  But presently, by the sounds, there seemed to be an examination going on, and then the driver’s voice said: 

“By George, the thoroughbrace is broke!”

This startled me broad awake—­as an undefined sense of calamity is always apt to do.  I said to myself:  “Now, a thoroughbrace is probably part of a horse; and doubtless a vital part, too, from the dismay in the driver’s voice.  Leg, maybe—­and yet how could he break his leg waltzing along such a road as this?  No, it can’t be his leg.  That is impossible, unless he was reaching for the driver.  Now, what can be the thoroughbrace of a horse, I wonder?  Well, whatever comes, I shall not air my ignorance in this crowd, anyway.”

Just then the conductor’s face appeared at a lifted curtain, and his lantern glared in on us and our wall of mail matter.  He said:  “Gents, you’ll have to turn out a spell.  Thoroughbrace is broke.”

We climbed out into a chill drizzle, and felt ever so homeless and dreary.  When I found that the thing they called a “thoroughbrace” was the massive combination of belts and springs which the coach rocks itself in, I said to the driver: