ay think proper to offer. So
'Hoo-roar for the principle, as the money-lender said ven he vouldn't
renoo the bill.'

"God bless you. . . . You know what I would say about home and the
darlings. A hundred times God bless you. . . . Fears are entertained for
Lord Ashburton also. Nothing has been heard of him."

A brief letter, sent me next day by the minister's bag, was in effect a
postscript to the foregoing, and expressed still more strongly the
doubts and apprehensions his voyage out had impressed him with, and
which, though he afterwards saw reason greatly to modify his misgivings,
were not so strange at that time as they appear to us now:

"Carlton House, New York, February twenty-eighth, 1842. . . . The
Caledonia, I grieve and regret to say, has not arrived. If she left
England to her time, she has been four-and-twenty days at sea. There is
no news of her; and on the nights of the fourteenth and eighteenth it
blew a terrible gale, which almost justifies the worst suspicions. For
myself, I have hardly any hope of her; having seen enough, in our
passage out, to convince me that steaming across the ocean in heavy
weather is as yet an experiment of the utmost hazard.

"As it was supposed that there would be no steamer whatever for England
this month (since in ordinary course the Caledonia would have returned
with the mails on the 2d of March), I hastily got the letters ready
yesterday and sent them by the Garrick; which may perhaps be three
weeks out, but is not very likely to be longer. But belonging to the
Cunard company is a boat called the Unicorn, which in the summertime
plies up the St. Lawrence, and brings passengers from Canada to join the
British and North American steamers at Halifax. In the winter she lies
at the last-mentioned place; from which news has come this morning that
they have sent her on to Boston for the mails, and, rather than
interrupt the communication, mean to dispatch her to England in lieu of
the poor Caledonia. This in itself, by the way, is a daring deed; for
she was originally built to run between Liverpool and Glasgow, and is no
more designed for the Atlantic than a Calais packet-boat; though she
once crossed it, in the summer season.

"You may judge, therefore, what the owners think of the probability of
the Caledonia's arrival. How slight an alteration in our plans would
have made us passengers on board of her!

"It would be difficult to tell you, my dear fellow, what an impressi