Guests at Foxwold are given the opportunity, when black Monday arrives, of catching a most unearthly and uneasily early train, which involves their rising with anything but a lark, swallowing a hurried breakfast, a mounting into fiery untamed one-horse shays soon after eight, and then being puffed away through South-Eastern tunnels to the busy hum of those unduly busy men of whom we speak.
To catch this early train, which means that you "leave the warm precincts of your cheerful bed, nor cast one longing lingering look behind," some of our friends most justly object, preferring the early calm, the well-considered uprisal, the dawdled breakfast, and the ladies' train at the maturer hour of 10.30. Our dear friend, Mr. Anstey Guthrie, having firmly and most wisely declined the early train and any consequent worm, one very chilly morn, as the early risers were starting for the station, appeared at his chamber window awfully arrayed in white, and muttering with the fervour of another John Bradford, "There goes Anstey Guthrie—but for the grace of God," plunged back into his rapidly cooling couch, "and left the world to darkness and to us."
[Chat No. 6.]
"It's idle to repine, I know;
I'll tell you what I'll do instead,
I'll drink my arrowroot, and go