“And at Crewe just the same thing happened. ‘There, there! don’t you see him! he’s urging me more than ever to get out,’ cried the young lady. ‘Very well,’ said Dr. Watson, ‘we will get out and go after him,’ and, with the young lady, he pursued the imaginary figure, and of course did not find him. But Dr. Watson had often been at Crewe station before, and he went to the hotel, which opens on the platform, and said to the matron, ‘Here is this young lady, who is not at all well, and should have a very quiet room; unfortunately I am not able to remain now to look after her, but I will leave her in your care, and to-morrow I shall be returning this way and will come to see how she is.’ And he slipped a five-pound note into the woman’s hand to guarantee expenses.
“Dr. Watson returned to the railway carriage. There was another young lady there, sitting in the place which the first young lady had occupied—a passenger who had arrived by one of the many lines which converge at Crewe. With the new young lady he did not make acquaintance, he moved his things to the other side of the carriage and devoted himself to his book.
“Three stations farther on came the shock of a frightful accident. There was a collision. The train was telescoped, and many passengers were terribly hurt. The heavy case of instruments, which was in the rack above the place where Dr. Watson had first been sitting, was thrown violently to the other side of the carriage, hit the young lady upon the forehead and killed her on the spot.
“It was long before the line could be sufficiently cleared for the train to pass which was sent to pick up the surviving passengers. Many hours late, in the middle of the night, Dr. Watson arrived at Oxenholme. There, waiting upon the platform, stood the young man with the light beard, in the brown ulster, exactly as he had been described. He had heard that the only young lady in the through carriage from London had been killed, and was only waiting for the worst to be confirmed. And Dr. Watson was the person who went up to him and said: ‘Unfortunately it is too true that a young lady has been killed, but it is not your young lady. Your young lady is safe in the station hotel at Crewe.’”
To Miss Leycester.
“Holmhurst, May 3.—I have had a visit from the people who formerly lived here, so surprised at the changes—at the continuation of the walk in the firwood, &c., but most at the number of pictures and books everywhere inside the house, a clothing of walls which they evidently thought most unsuitable in a dining-room and passages, and most of all were they rather shocked at finding an ancient Madonna and Child of the Luca della Robbia school over the kitchen fireplace, though in an Italian house you might almost expect one there.
“I have nothing else interesting to tell you, so I will send you some scraps from my notebook. Lord Brownlow, at a public meeting, heard a schoolmaster say—‘Education is that which enables you to despise the opinions of others, and conduces to situations of considerable emolument.’ Miss Cobbe told me—‘Conscience is that which supplies you with an excellent motive for doing that which you desire to do, and which, when it is done, leaves you filled with self-satisfaction.’
“Mrs. L. (who has plantations in South America) has been telling me of a nigger preacher there who said in the pulpit, ‘I am so blind I cannot see; I’ve left my specs at home,’ and all the congregation thought he was giving out the line of a hymn, and sung it lustily.”
