 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 faculties, Nature
might have gifted me.
    When I left the coach, the strange speech of the cabmen and others waiting
round, seemed to me odd as a foreign tongue. I had never before heard the
English language chopped up in that way. However, I managed to understand and to
be understood, so far as to get myself and trunk safely conveyed to the old inn
whereof I had the address. How difficult, how oppressive, how puzzling seemed my
flight! In London for the first time; at an inn for the first time; tired with
travelling; confused with darkness; palsied with cold; unfurnished with either
experience or advice to tell me how to act, and yet - to act obliged.
    Into the hands of Common-sense I confided the matter. Common-sense, however,
was as chilled and bewildered as all my other faculties, and it was only under
the spur of an inexorable necessity that she spasmodically executed her trust.
Thus urged, she paid the porter: considering the crisis, I did not blame her too
much that she was hugely cheated; she asked the waiter for a room; she
timorously called for the chambermaid; what is far more, she bore, without being
wholly overcome, a highly supercilious style of demeanour from that young lady,
when she appeared.
    I recollect this same chambermaid was a pattern of town prettiness and
smartness. So trim her waist, her cap, her dress - I wondered how they had all
been manufactured. Her speech had an accent which in its mincing glibness seemed
to rebuke mine as by authority; her spruce attire flaunted an easy scorn at my
plain country garb.
    »Well
