I found her in her drawing-room, where every sofa, cabinet, chair, and table was covered with my clothes and linen, which hers and other kind hands were marking. The perpetual consciousness of doing kind and useful acts had made an angelic smile the inseparable companion of her face, and with that loved, that dearly-remembered smile did she now receive me.
To all the stores she had so laboured to procure for me she had added as her own present a complete writing-box and dressing-case combined—a luxury of peculiar value to me, which my own funds would have found it difficult to compass; but finding me uneasy lest I should be left behind or be thought tardy by my commander, “Go,” she said, “you shan’t wait for your baggage; we will have it all packed up, and I will send my butler with it to Portsmouth, that I may be sure of its reaching you.”
Down to Portsmouth then I went on the outside of the Mail, in the highest health and the ardent spirits of youth—spirits that made, I suppose, even my body buoyant and elastic, for the Mail overturned in the night and threw me on the road without giving me so much as a scratch or a bruise. It was about twenty miles from London when we met a team of horses standing in a slant direction on the road, the night very foggy with misting rain, and the lamps not penetrating farther into the mist than the rumps of the wheelers. The coachman, to avoid the waggon, turned suddenly out of the way and ran up the bank. Finding the coach swaggering, I got up, with my face to the horses, hardly daring to suppose it possible that the Mail could overturn, when the unwieldy monster was on one wheel, and then down it came with a terminal bang. During my descent I had just time to hope that I might escape with the fracture of one or two legs, and then found myself on my two shoulders, very much pleased with the novelty and ease of the journey. I got me up, and spied the monster with his two free wheels whirling with great velocity, but quite compact and still in the body, and as soon as I had shaken my feathers and opened my senses I began to think of the one female and three males in the inside, whom I supposed to be either dead or asleep. I ran to open the door, when the guard, having thought of the same thing, did it for me, and we then took out the folks one by one, like pickled ghirkins, or anything else preserved in a jar, by putting our hands to the bottom. We found that the inmates were only stupefied, though all had bruises of some kind, and one little gentleman complained that he was nipped in the loins by the mighty pressure of his neighbour, who had sat upon him some time after the door was opened, to recollect himself or to give thanks for his escape.
The Start.
“Down to Portsmouth then I went on the outside of the Mail.”
The lady told me “she was terribly hurt indeed,” and so, when we got to the supper place, I gave her a kipperkin of boiled port wine with much spice. She agreed it was very nice, and looked more cheery, but the rest of the inside passengers seemed to think that it would not look well to eat after being overturned.
Not one on the outside was hurt in the least degree, and I, being on the top of the coach, had the farthest fly.
I had not been without my fears that on arriving at Portsmouth I should have to hasten on board, and perhaps sail without my baggage; but the wind had changed, all the troops were not yet embarked, and nobody seemed to be thinking of anything but gaiety and amusement, or the not unpleasant business of laying in comforts for the voyage.
Sir James Craig and Lefebure were lodging together, and kindly took me in till I could provide myself better. With Lefebure I had early acquaintance, and since entering the Army we had been employed in neighbouring stations, and I knew that under Sir James Craig’s command he had come to be reckoned perhaps the best officer of his early standing. He, I found, was to be of our company, as well as Hoste and Lewis, two more of my earlier friends.