anners displayed and
martial pomps, we make our second entry as crusading soldiers militant
for God, by personal choice and by sacramental oath. Each man says in
effect--"Lo! I rebaptise myself; and that which once was sworn on my
behalf, now I swear for myself." Even so in dreams, perhaps, under some
secret conflict of the midnight sleeper, lighted up to the consciousness
at the time, but darkened to the memory as soon as all is finished, each
several child of our mysterious race completes for himself the aboriginal
fall.

As I drew near to the Manchester post office, I found that it was
considerably past midnight; but to my great relief, as it was important for
me to be in Westmorland by the morning, I saw by the huge saucer eyes of
the mail, blazing through the gloom of overhanging houses, that my chance
was not yet lost. Past the time it was; but by some luck, very unusual in
my experience, the mail was not even yet ready to start. I ascended to
my seat on the box, where my cloak was still lying as it had lain at
the Bridgewater Arms. I had left it there in imitation of a nautical
discoverer, who leaves a bit of bunting on the shore of his discovery, by
way of warning off the ground the whole human race, and signalising to the
Christian and the heathen worlds, with his best compliments, that he has
planted his throne for ever upon that virgin soil: henceforward claiming
the _jus dominii_ to the top of the atmosphere above it, and also the right
of driving shafts to the centre of the earth below it; so that all people
found after this warning, either aloft in the atmosphere, or in the
shafts, or squatting on the soil, will be treated as trespassers--that is,
decapitated by their very faithful and obedient servant, the owner of the
said bunting. Possibly my cloak might not have been respected, and the _jus
gentium_ might have been cruelly violated in my person--for, in the dark,
people commit deeds of darkness, gas being a great ally of morality--but it
so happened that, on this night, there was no other outside passenger;
and the crime, which else was but too probable, missed fire for want of
a criminal. By the way, I may as well mention at this point, since a
circumstantial accuracy is essential to the effect of my narrative, that
there was no other person of any description whatever about the mail--the
guard, the coachman, and myself being allowed for--except only one--a
horrid creature of the class known to the wor