Eliza's aunt Martha declared that she would accompany me to Falmouth and see me sail. "I am old enough, and thank God I am no beauty," said aunt Martha, "and I may do what I please with my own little fortune. I have never yet been ten miles from my native place, and I want to see the world."
Fresh floods of tears were now forced out for my aunt Martha; however go she would.
"The worst of it is," continued aunt Martha, "that my habit is five and twenty years old, and as to travelling without a habit that is quite impossible."
"I think between us all three we can alter it into something smart and fashionable," said Eliza, and the next hour saw them occupied in unpicking, cutting, and basting at my aunt Martha's most ample calico habit.
I proposed setting off in two days. Much as I dreaded the sea, and hated the idea of Spain and war, still, anything was better than thus wasting one's sweetness on the desert air: besides, I was under a sort of engagement to join Worcester, if Worcester found it impossible to return to me. "Poor Meyler," thought I, and I will tell my readers a secret, I would much rather have gone to London.
I took an affectionate leave of my mother and sister in two very long letters; but I did not write to Meyler, I wanted him to remain in doubt as to my having left Charmouth, that he might remember me the longer.
My aunt Martha's habit was completely modernised in due time, and Mrs. Edmond and her amiable daughter passed the whole of the last day in preparing little nice cakes, &c., for our travelling basket, which aunt Martha was strictly charged not to lose sight of.
At last we were seated in the Falmouth mail, on a fine clear summer morning. We travelled all day and all night, and poor aunt Martha was half dead with fatigue on the following evening, when we were set down at the first-rate inn at Falmouth.
We begged the chamber-maid to conduct us immediately to a good two-bedded room.
"Oh, ladies," announced the woman pertly, "you must take what you can get; for we are so full, that I don't know where on earth to put half of you, owing to the wind having been so directly contrary for more than three weeks. Thus ships are every day coming in, while all the passengers for Spain have been waiting at Falmouth these three weeks, and we have got a consul, or ambassador, or something great of that kind, who has occupied all our best rooms for the last fortnight, with his secretaries and black footmen, and all the rest of it."