There is daylight at last, and fresh air. I trot contemptuously
through the advanced skirmishers of the Scotch invading army; and
watch my friends some mile and a half off, who have threaded a
practicable track-way through a long dreary yellow bog, too wet for
firs to root in, and are away in 'a streamer.' Now a streamer is
produced in this wise. There is but one possible gap in a bank, one
possible ford in a brook; one possible path in a cover; and as each
man has to wait till the man before him gets through, and them
gallops on, each man loses twenty yards or more on the man before
him: wherefore, by all laws of known arithmetic, if ten men tail
through a gap, then will the last of the ten find himself two hundred
yards behind the foremost, which process several times repeated,
produces the phenomenon called a streamer, viz. twenty men galloping
absurdly as hard as they can, in a line half a mile long, and in
humours which are celestial in the few foremost, contented in the
central, and gradually becoming darker in the hindmost; till in the
last man they assume a hue altogether Tartarean.
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