e me once more lyrically recognise in my heart
(not without a sign of regret) the very different coffee and toast with
which you helped me out of my headache. At two there was another stop of
ten minutes, that might be employed in lunching or otherwise. Feeling
myself more fevered than hungry, I determined on spending the time in
combing my hair and washing my face and hands with vinegar. In the midst
of this solacing operation I heard what seemed to be the Mail running
its rapid course, and quick as lightning it flashed on me, 'There it
goes! and my luggage is on the top of it, and my purse is in the pocket
of it, and here am I stranded on an unknown beach, without so much as a
sixpence in my pocket to pay for the vinegar I have already consumed!'
Without my bonnet, my hair hanging down my back, my face half dried, and
the towel, with which I was drying it, firm grasped in my hand, I dashed
out--along, down, opening wrong doors, stumbling over steps, cursing the
day I was born, still more the day on which I took a notion to travel,
and arrived finally at the bar of the Inn, in a state of excitement
bordering on lunacy. The barmaids looked at me 'with wonder and
amazement.' 'Is the coach gone?' I gasped out. 'The coach? Yes!' 'Oh!
and you have let it away without me! Oh! stop it, cannot you stop it?'
and out I rushed into the street, with streaming hair and streaming
towel, and almost brained myself against--the Mail! which was standing
there in all stillness, without so much as a horse in it! What I had
heard was a heavy coach. And now, having descended like a maniac, I
ascended again like a fool, and dried the other half of my face, and put
on my bonnet, and came back 'a sadder and a wiser woman.'

I did not find my husband at the 'Swan with Two Necks'; for we were in a
quarter of an hour before the appointed time. So I had my luggage put
on the backs of two porters, and walked on to Cheapside, where I
presently found a Chelsea omnibus. By and by, however, the omnibus
stopped, and amid cries of 'No room, sir,' 'Can't get in,' Carlyle's
face, beautifully set off by a broad-brimmed white hat, gazed in at the
door, like the Peri, who, 'at the Gate of Heaven, stood disconsolate.'
In hurrying along the Strand, pretty sure of being too late, amidst all
the imaginable and unimaginable phenomena which the immense thoroughfare
of a street presents, his eye (Heaven bless the mark!) had lighted on my
trunk perched on the top of t