u, next
door but one to the second house below, and directly opposite the
building across the way, there was just one span of buckskin horses in
the city that could take a carriage built expressly for ladies to that
place, as naturally as though it were a stable. It was a place that
he--the hackman--always associated with his own mother, because he was
so familiar with it in childhood, and had often thought of driving to it
blindfolded for a wager.

Proud to learn that her guardian was so well known in the great city,
and delighted that she had met a charioteer so minutely familiar with
his house of business, FLORA stepped readily into the providential hack,
which thereupon instantly began Rocking-Chair-ing, Old-Shoe-ing, and
Gliding. Any one of these celebrated processes, by itself, might have
been desirable; but their indiscriminate and impetuous combination in
the present case gave the Flowerpot a confused impression that her whole
ride was a startling series of incessant sharp turns around obdurate
street corners, and kept her plunging about like an early young
Protestant tossed in a Romish blanket. Instinctively holding her satchel
aloft, to save its fragile contents from fracture, she rocked, shoed and
glided all over the interior of the vehicle, without hope of gaining
breath enough for even one scream, until, nearly unconscious, and, with
her bonnet driven half-way into her chignon, she was helped out by the
hackman at her guardian's door.

"I am dying!" she groaned.

"Then please remember me in your will, to the extent of two dollars,"
returned the hackman with much humor. "You're only a little sea-sick,
miss; as often happens to people in humble circumstances when they ride
in a kerridge for the first time."

Still panting, Miss POTTS paid and discharged this friendly man, and,
weariedly entering the building, followed the signs up-stairs to her
guardian's office.

After knocking several times at the right door without reply, she turned
the knob, and entered so softly that the venerable lawyer was not
aroused from the slumber into which he had fallen in his chair by the
window. With a copy of _Putnam's Magazine_ still grasped in his honest
right hand, good Mr. DIBBLE slept like a drugged person; nor could the
young girl awaken him until, by a happy inspiration, she had snatched
away the monthly and cast it through the casement.

"Am I dreaming?" exclaimed the aged man, when thus suddenly rescued from
h