Oh! but this house was not a bit like mine or yours; yet it had doors
and windows like any other house, but so tiny these doors and windows
were, they were hardly worth mentioning. Imagine a house on four wheels,
and no higher than a man of middle size, with three little windows high
up admitting light and air from outside; you entered by a wooden
staircase that looked more like the ladder of a windmill than anything
else.
This queer construction rolled most part of the year along the high
roads, jolting, gee-wo, gee-hup! in and out of the ruts, and carting
about in its interior men and animals, to say nothing of household
stuff—beds, cooking-stoves, chests crammed with clothes, and a whole
heap of other things. An old horse, who was little better than a bag of
bones, was in the shafts; when a halt was called, they let him crop the
grass alongside the hedgerows.
It was the funniest thing, being hauled along like this, tossing and
tumbling in this box on wheels where the furniture seemed to be always
just on the point of starting a polka. The table would throw up its legs
in the air, and the chairs turn head over heels, while the pots and pans
knocked together in the corners, making the quaintest music, sharp or
flat in key according to the jolts.
Jack, perched atop of a big press, held on tooth and nail to save a
tumble. More often than not he found himself under the table along with
his good friend Murph, a Stoic philosopher, who let nothing ever disturb
his equanimity, but calmly went on beating the bush of his thick woolly
coat in search of the game that lived there. All the while the caravan,
bumping and thumping with a terrific rattle, was tacking and luffing
over the rolling billows of the stony roads.