MORE COMMON INCIDENTS. 



Instead, therefore, of taking a farewell dinner with one of my town 

 acquaintance, I requested my landlady to get me a chop and a potatoe. 

 Not being, either in a position or a mood to exert any epicurean hy- 

 percriticism upor the culinary effusions of my hostess, I experienced 

 but a few trifling convulsive twitches at its appearance, when I found 

 that the animal portion of my meal had been fried, and the vegetable 

 ditto roasted; the more especially as the former seemed to enjoy a 

 most exemplary quietude, in a perfect looking-glass of fat. But as 

 to the roasted esculent, the deviation seemed to infer an offensive and 

 personal reflection upon my moral habits, for all civilized communi- 

 ties know, that a man who would eat a roasted potatoe would stick 

 at nothing. 



After having transmitted a porter with my luggage, I proceeded 

 to the coach-office. My inside place assumed, I tranquilly resigned 

 myself to that moral abstraction which a man of 23 may be supposed 

 to indulge in, on the eve of a matrimonial excursion. The silken 

 links of my imaginative chain were rudely dislocated by the coach- 

 door opening to give ingress to a methodical sort of a man, endowed 

 with a head displaying the unruffled uniformity of surface presented 

 by an early kidney potatoe. A few remarks, exploded by this per- 

 sonage, allusive to the state of the markets at Manchester and Bris- 

 tol, corroborated by the material existence of four books of patterns 

 which he released from his pockets, and deposited in the seat of the 

 coach, dismissed all question as to the calling of my fellow traveller. 

 I booked him, of course, as a tailor's bagman. 



Two very fat elderly ladies, evidently sisters, and whose sex, to 

 have judged solely from their countenances, would have puzzled a 

 fairish physiologist, were soon ushered inside to complete our num- 

 ber, and we made progress through the inn-yard and gateway in 

 solemn silence, nor do I remember that this taciturn disposition of 

 our party, seemingly adopted by mutual consent, was much, if at all 

 intruded upon during our journey to Bristol. From time to time we 

 separately went through the usual ordeal of sullen coachmen claiming 

 their shilling or eighteen-pence ; neither was there withheld, from 

 the refreshment-needing and time-stinted traveller, the solacing tribute 

 of British brandy-and-water boiling hot at the coach-door. The man 

 of patterns appeared somewhat attentive to the calls of hunger, as he 

 managed, by dint of repeated importunities, to dissipate a Bologna 

 sausage, as thick as the cartridge of a six-pounder. 



On our arrival at Bristol, I lost no time in obtaining a passage for 

 the shores of Monmouthshire, where, at the house of an old and 

 valued acquaintance, I fully anticipated meeting, as visitors, an 

 elderly relict, with her only daughter, in whose future prospects 

 I felt a more than ordinary interest. My host was a retired West 

 India planter, of sober age, lately married to a spinster-heiress, who 

 at some remote, but not to be nicely ascertained period of her life, 

 had been five and forty. She was not a " good one" she was many 

 degrees distant from a good one. She was as the fruit of a crab- slip 

 ingrafted upon a sloe-tree stem sour and astringent. 



I met Eliza, my fully intended, and alone too, in the park, while 

 crossing it, in my impatience to arrive at the mansion of my friend. 

 We walked and talked, brushing away the crackling hoar-frost which 



