self
to her memory; why should I? She came for her son to accompany her in a
walk, and behind her followed a nurse, carrying an infant. I only
mention the incident because, in addressing the nurse, Mrs. Leigh spoke
French (very bad French, by the way, and with an incorrigibly bad
accent, again forcibly reminding me of our school-days): and I found
the woman was a foreigner. The little boy chattered volubly in French
too. When the whole party were withdrawn, Mrs. Barrett remarked that
her young lady had brought that foreign nurse home with her two years
ago, on her return from a Continental excursion; that she was treated
almost as well as a governess, and had nothing to do but walk out with
the baby and chatter French with Master Charles; "and," added Mrs.
Barrett, "she says there are many Englishwomen in foreign families as
well placed as she."

I stored up this piece of casual information, as careful housewives
store seemingly worthless shreds and fragments for which their
prescient minds anticipate a possible use some day. Before I left my
old friend, she gave me the address of a respectable old-fashioned inn
in the City, which, she said, my uncles used to frequent in former days.

In going to London, I ran less risk and evinced less enterprise than
the reader may think. In fact, the distance was only fifty miles. My
means would suffice both to take me there, to keep me a few days, and
also to bring me back if I found no inducement to stay. I regarded it
as a brief holiday, permitted for once to work-weary faculties, rather
than as an adventure of life and death. There is nothing like taking
all you do at a moderate estimate: it keeps mind and body tranquil;
whereas grandiloquent notions are apt to hurry both into fever.

Fifty miles were then a day's journey (for I speak of a time gone by:
my hair, which, till a late period, withstood the frosts of time, lies
now, at last white, under a white cap, like snow beneath snow). About
nine o'clock of a wet February night I reached London.

My reader, I know, is one who would not thank me for an elaborate
reproduction of poetic first impressions; and it is well, inasmuch as I
had neither time nor mood to cherish such; arriving as I did late, on a
dark, raw, and rainy evening, in a Babylon and a wilderness, of which
the vastness and the strangeness tried to the utmost any powers of
clear thought and steady self-possession with which, in the absence of
more brilliant facu