While Mr. Sandboys was thus philosophically reviewing his conduct, the more domestic partner of his bosom was mentally “looking after” the luggage that she had left behind in charge of Postlethwaite and Ann Lightfoot, until she could send a suitable conveyance for it. Though it had been agreed that the family were but to stay a week in the Metropolis, and Mr. Sandboys, knowing that women, when on the wing, want the Peacock’s faculty of packing up their fine feathers in the smallest possible compass, had given strict injunctions that they should take only such things as were absolutely necessary. But, primitive as were the denizens of Buttermere, and far removed as its mountain-fastnesses seemed from the realms of fashion, the increased facilities of intercommunication had not failed to diffuse a knowledge of Polkas and Crinolines among the female portion of its pastoral people; so that what with “best bonnets,” and “dress caps,” that had to be stowed away in square black boxes kept expressly for them—and gowns, with so many breadths and flounces, that, to prevent being crushed, they required nearly a whole trunk to themselves—and morning dresses and evening dresses—and cardinals and paletots—and be-laced and be-frilled nightcaps and night-gowns—all equally incompressible—and muffs and tippets—and whiskers and artificial flowers and feathers—and bustles and false fronts, that did not admit of any more compact stowage—and bottles of bandoline and perfume—and pots of cold cream and lip salve—and writing-cases and work-boxes—all and every of which the ladies declared to be positively indispensable for the trip;—what with these things, we say, it was found that by the time the packing was done, the boxes, and trunks, and portmanteaus, and carpet-bags, and hat-cases, and band-boxes, and umbrellas, that constituted the family luggage, amounted to no less than three-and-twenty different articles. Each of these the careful Mrs. Sandboys had duly set down and numbered on a card which she carried with her, and which she kept continually drawing from her bosom and reading over as she journeyed along.
Jobby and Elcy walked in the rear; the former thinking of nothing, but full of what are called animal spirits, skittish as a colt, and unable to continue long at any one thing,—now throwing up a stone and endeavouring to hit it as it descended through the air, to the imminent peril of his mother’s bonnet—then making “ducks and drakes” along the lake with small pieces of the mountain slate—the next moment aiming at some bird as it skimmed across the water—the next, scampering up the hill-side with his sister Elcy’s miserable-looking and most unsportsman-like Italian greyhound at his heels, starting the mountain sheep—and then descending with several sprigs of the “whin” or furze bushes in his hand, and stealthily dropping them into his father’s coat-tail pocket, in the earnest hope of seeing the old gentleman shortly sit down to rest himself by the way on some neighbouring crag.
Elcy, with her eyes moist with tears—though she hardly knew why—was too sad to talk, or mind the tricks that her brother played with either her father or her poor little shivering pet dog. It was the first time she had ever left her home; and though her woman’s curiosity made her long to see London, of which she had heard so much, the departure from Hassness was like leaving some dear old friend. The mountains, which for so many years she had seen, flushed with the young light, “first thing” when she opened her eyes in the morning, she had got to know and almost love like living things. She had watched them under every aspect,—with the white snow lying on them, and bringing them so close that they looked like huge icebergs floating towards her—or with the noonday sun lighting up their green sides, and the shapes of the opposite peaks and crags painted in black shadow upon them—or with the million stars shining in the grey sky above their heads, like luminous dust, and their huge dim forms sleeping in the haze of the moonlight, and looking like distant storm-clouds rather than solid masses of rock.
Each of the hills round about had its own proper name, and so had assumed a kind of natural personification in Elcy’s mind. Every one, to her fancy, was a different being associated with a different feeling; for some she had the same reverence as for the aged, while some, woman-like, she half loved for the sense of power they impressed her with. And as she journeyed along the banks of the lakes they surrounded, and each fresh turn brought some new mountain form into sight, a dark train of melancholy thoughts swept across her mind like the shadows of clouds flitting along some peaceful meadow, and she trod the path with the sound of an ideal bell droning in her ears.
Thus the Sandboys travelled on to the house of John Coss, the cobbler post-boy, in the hopes of getting some sort of a conveyance over to Cockermouth. But though John Coss was nowhere to be met with, they were, luckily, just in time to catch the Loweswater post-master, who, finding that all the correspondence in that part of the country had come to an end, had stuck up a notice that the letterbox at his office would be closed till after the Great Exhibition, and was then on his way, in the empty mail-cart, to the Cockermouth railway station.
Once at Cockermouth, the necessary preparations were soon made for the Sandboys’ journey to the great metropolis. Jobby was shod, Cursty himself was breeched; Postlethwaite, Ann Lightfoot, and the “things” were duly removed from Hassness, and everything seemed to promise that the family really would enjoy themselves at last.
They were but just in time for obtaining their outfit. All the principal gentry and tradesmen had already left the town, and the smaller fry were making ready to follow the examples of their bigger brethren. The shutters of the Castle were closed, the mail-coach of “the General” had been put on the rails and carried to London, with “the Lord Paramount” shut up inside of it. At Derwent House the blinds had all been papered, and the gilt frames and chandeliers put into brown holland pinafores, while Lawyer Steel himself had pleaded a set-off, and moved himself, by writ of some kind or other, to the capital. The little grey pony, upon whose “body” Coroner Brag had so often “sat,” had been put upon board-wages at the Globe Inn. Doctor Bell and his brother “Dickey,” the cheerful, smiling, good-natured “medical men” of the town, had for a time ceased that friendly interchange of commodities which consisted in the giving of physic and the taking of wine with their several patients, and finding that their invalids had all taken to their “last legs,”—that the consumptions had gone galloping off—and that the declines had suddenly got out of “the last stage,” and jumped into the first train, the Esculapian Adelphi had felt each other’s pulse, and respectively prescribing a few weeks’ change of air for their complaints, had both started after their patients, as lively as return hearses.
Even Jonathan Wood, the quondam Boniface, who, like Atlas of old, used to have the whole weight of “the Globe” on his shoulders, and had supported it till he had positively got red in the face—even jolly Jonathan himself had disappeared from the town. “The Sun,” too, had lost all attraction to its attendant planets, who, no longer gravitating towards it, had flown off at a tangent to the metropolis.
But though there was neither heat nor light in the “Sun,” at Cockermouth, still in the interior of the “Globe” there was a small fire, and here beside the grateful hobs of the cosey hostelry, Mr., Mrs., and the younger Sandboys located themselves until such time as all was ready for the start.
The journey from Cockermouth to Workington per rail is by no means of an agreeable character. The line being in none of the most flourishing conditions, every means for economizing the “working expenses” have been resorted to. The men engaged upon it have been cut down to boys; so that the establishment has very much the look of a kind of railway academy, where the porters on the platform are ever playing at marbles or leapfrog, where the policemen all wear pinafores, and where the clerks are taken to the station in the morning, and “fetched” in the evening by the maids of their anxious parents. We have heard the united ages of the entire staff, but fear to mention the small amount, lest a too incredulous public should accuse us of magnifying, or rather parvifying the tenderness of their years. Suffice it that not a razor is used by the whole establishment; and that the “staff,”—we have it on the best authority—are allowed to give over work an hour earlier every Saturday evening, in consideration of its being “tub-night.”