n the coach between
Lanark and Glasgow. There were only two inside passengers besides myself;
viz. an elderly woman, and a gentleman, apparently about thirty years of
age, who sported a fur cap, a Hessian cloak, and large moustaches. The
former was, I think, about the most unpleasant person to look at I had
ever seen. Her features were singularly harsh and forbidding. She was also
perfectly taciturn, for she never opened her lips, but left me and the
other passenger to keep up the conversation the best way we could. The
young man I found to be a very pleasant and intelligent fellow--quite a
gentleman in his manners; and apparently either an Oxon or a Cantab, for
he talked much and well about the English universities, a subject on which
I also happened to be tolerably conversant. But, agreeable as his
conversation was, it could not prevent me from entertaining an unpleasant
feeling--one almost amounting to dislike and hostility--against the
female; whom I regarded, from the first moment, with singular aversion. We
were not troubled, however, very long with her company, for she left us at
Dalserf, about half way between Lanark and Hamilton.

"It is very curious, sir," said I to the stranger when she had gone, "that
I should feel so strangely annoyed as I have been with that woman. I
absolutely know nothing about her, and cannot lay a single fault to her
charge, but plain looks and taciturnity; and yet I feel as if no
inducement would tempt me to step again into a coach where I knew she was
to be present. And after all, for any thing I know to the contrary, she
may be a very good woman."

"Your feelings, sir," answered he, "are remarkable, but by no means new;
for I have myself been subject to a precisely similar train of emotions,
and from a cause similar to yours. The thing is odd, I allow--what my
friend, Coleridge, would call a psychological curiosity--but, I believe,
every human being has at times felt it more or less. The unlucky woman who
has proved such a source of annoyance to you, has been none whatever to
me. She is plain-looked, to be sure, but it did not strike me that there
was any thing peculiarly unpleasant in her aspect; and as for her silence,
_that_, in my eyes, is no discommendation. So much for the different
trains of emotions experienced by different persons from the same cause.
There is, in truth, my dear sir, no accounting for such metaphysical
phenomena. We must just take them as we find them, and