ith a wheel-barrow full of boxes
and portmanteaus, stood a little in the van; and the footman, who was
to follow when lodgings had been found, had gone to a rising eminence to
watch the dawning of the expected "Sun," and apprise us of its approach
by the concerted signal of a handkerchief fixed to a stick.

The quaint old house looked at us mournfully from all its deserted
windows. The litter before its threshold and in its open hall; wisps of
straw or hay that had been used for packing; baskets and boxes that had
been examined and rejected; others, corded and piled, reserved to follow
with the footman; and the two heated and hurried serving-women left
behind, standing halfway between house and garden-gate, whispering to
each other, and looking as if they had not slept for weeks,--gave to a
scene, usually so trim and orderly, an aspect of pathetic abandonment
and desolation. The Genius of the place seemed to reproach us. I felt
the omens were against us, and turned my earnest gaze from the haunts
behind with a sigh, as the coach now drew up with all its grandeur. An
important personage, who, despite the heat of the day, was enveloped
in a vast superfluity of belcher, in the midst of which galloped a gilt
fox, and who rejoiced in the name of "guard," descended to inform us
politely that only three places, two inside and one out, were at our
disposal, the rest having been pre-engaged a fortnight before our orders
were received.

Now, as I knew that Mrs. Primmins was indispensable to the comforts of
my honored parents (the more so as she had once lived in London, and
knew all its ways), I suggested that she should take the outside seat,
and that I should perform the journey on foot,--a primitive mode of
transport which has its charms to a young man with stout limbs and gay
spirits. The guard's outstretched arm left my mother little time to
oppose this proposition, to which my father assented with a silent
squeeze of the hand. And having promised to join them at a family hotel
near the Strand, to which Mr. Squills had recommended them as peculiarly
genteel and quiet, and waved my last farewell to my poor mother, who
continued to stretch her meek face out of the window till the coach was
whirled off in a cloud like one of the Homeric heroes, I turned
within, to put up a few necessary articles in a small knapsack which I
remembered to have seen in the lumber-room, and which had appertained
to my maternal grandfather; and wit