Publisher's Synopsis
A coach-and-six, as a rule, may be called an impressive Object. But something depends on where you see it. Viewed from the tall cliffs-along the base of which, on a strip of beach two hundred feet below, it crawled between the American continent and the Atlantic Ocean-Captain Oliver Vyell's coach-and-six resembled nothing so nearly as a black-beetle. For that matter the cliffs themselves, swept by the spray and humming with the roar of the beach-even the bald headland towards which they curved as to the visible bourne of all things terrestrial-shrank in comparison with the waste void beyond, where sky and ocean weltered together after the wrestle of a two days' storm; and in comparison with the thought that this rolling sky and heaving water stretched all the way to Europe. Not a sail showed, not a wing anywhere under the leaden clouds that still dropped their rain in patches, smurring out the horizon. The wind had died down, but the ships kept their harbours and the sea-birds their inland shelters. Alone of animate things, Captain Vyell's coach-and-six crept forth and along the beach, as though tempted by the promise of a wintry gleam to landward. A god-if we may suppose one of the old careless Olympians seated there on the cliff-top, nursing his knees-must have enjoyed the comedy of it, and laughed to think that this pert beetle, edging its way along the sand amid the eternal forces of nature, was here to take seizin of them-yes, actually to take seizin and exact tribute. So indomitable a fellow is Man, improbus Homo; and among men in his generation Captain Oliver Vyell was Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston, Massachusetts.
