 same quick pace, until he had passed the finger-post, and was on
the high road to London. He slackened very little in his speed even then, but he
began to think, and look about him, and to disengage his senses from the coil of
angry passions which hitherto had held them prisoner.
    It must be confessed that, at that moment, he had no very agreeable
employment either for his moral or his physical perceptions. The day was dawning
from a patch of watery light in the east, and sullen clouds came driving up
before it, from which the rain descended in a thick, wet mist. It streamed from
every twig and bramble in the hedge; made little gullies in the path; ran down a
hundred channels in the road; and punched innumerable holes into the face of
every pond and gutter. It fell with an oozy, slushy sound among the grass; and
made a muddy kennel of every furrow in the ploughed fields. No living creature
was anywhere to be seen. The prospect could hardly have been more desolate if
animated nature had been dissolved in water, and poured down upon the earth
again in that form.
    The range of view within the solitary traveller, was quite as cheerless as
the scene without. Friendless and penniless; incensed to the last degree; deeply
wounded in his pride and self-love; full of independent schemes, and perfectly
destitute of any means of realising them; his most vindictive enemy might have
been satisfied with the extent of his troubles. To add to his other miseries, he
was by this time sensible of being wet to the skin, and cold at his very heart.
    In this deplorable condition, he remembered Mr. Pinch's book; more because
it was rather troublesome to carry, than from any hope of being comforted by
that parting gift. He looked at the dingy lettering on the back, and finding it
to be an odd volume of the »Bachelor of Salamanca,« in the French tongue, cursed
Tom Pinch's folly, twenty times. He was on the point of throwing it away, in his
ill-humour and vexation, when he bethought himself that Tom had referred him to
a leaf, turned down; and opening it, at that place, that he might have
additional cause of complaint against him for supposing that any cold scrap of
the Bachelor's wisdom could cheer him in such circumstances, found -
    Well, well! not much, but Tom's all. The half-sovereign. He had wrapped it
hastily in a piece of paper, and pinned it to
