rison-bell ringing out
loud and clear. Thrice within the first three minutes we had to pull up
suddenly, on the brink of formidable accidents, from the dangerous speed
we maintained, and which, nevertheless, the driver had orders to
maintain, as essential to our plan. All the stoppages and hinderances of
every kind along the road had been anticipated previously, and met by
contrivance, of one kind or other; and Pierpoint was constantly a little
ahead of us to attend to anything that had been neglected. The
consequence of these arrangements was--- that no person along the road
could possibly have assisted to trace us by anything in our appearance:
for we passed all objects at too flying a pace, and through darkness too
profound, to allow of any one feature in our equipage being distinctly
noticed. Ten miles out of town, a space which we traversed in forty-four
minutes, a second relay of horses was ready; but we carried on the same
postilions throughout. Six miles a-head of this distance we had a second
relay; and with this set of horses, after pushing two miles further
along the road, we crossed by a miserable lane five miles long, scarcely
even a bridge road, into another of the great roads from the capital;
and by thus crossing the country, we came back upon the city at a point
far distant from that at which we left it. We had performed a distance
of forty-two miles in three hours, and lost a fourth hour upon the
wretched five miles of cross-road. It was therefore four o'clock, and
broad daylight, when we drew near the suburbs of the city; but a most
happy accident now favoured us; a fog the most intense now prevailed;
nobody could see an object six feet distant; we alighted in an
uninhabited new-built street, plunged into the fog, thus confounding our
traces to any observer. We then stepped into a hackney-coach which had
been stationed at a little distance. Thence, according to our plan, we
drove to a miserable quarter of the town, whither the poor only and the
wretched resorted; mounted a gloomy dirty staircase, and, befriended by
the fog, still growing thicker and thicker, and by the early hour of the
morning, reached a house previously hired, which, if shocking to the eye
and the imagination from its squalid appearance and its gloom, still was
a home--a sanctuary--an asylum from treachery, from captivity, from
persecution. Here Pierpoint for the present quitted us: and once more
Agnes, Hannah, and I, the shattered me