Chapter II

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.