“If you please, Mr. Stevens,” said the panting damsel, holding up something towards the box—“if you please, Mr. Stevens, mother’s gone to Lonnon—in the light cart—and will you be so kind as to give her—her linchpin.”
Mr. Stevens took the article with a smile, and I fancied with a sly squeeze of the hand that delivered it.
“If such a go had been anyone’s but your mother’s, Fanny,” he slyly remarked, “I should have said it was somebody in love.” The Dispatch was too strictly timed to allow of further parley; the horses broke, or were rather broken, into a gallop, in pursuit of the mother of Fanny, the Flower of Waltham; and the pin secretly acting as a spur, we did the next five mile in something like twenty minutes.
In spite, however, of this unusual speed, we never overtook Mrs. Merryweather and her cart till we arrived at the Basing-House, where we found her chirping over a cup of ale; as safe and sound as if linchpins had never been invented; in fact, she made as light of the article, when it was handed to her, as if it had been only a pin out of her gown!
FANCY PORTRAIT—MRS. NELSON.
“Well, I must say one thing for Mrs. Nelson,” said our coachman, as he resumed his seat on the box, “and that’s this. There’s no pinning at the Bull. She sets her face against everything but the patent boxes. She may come to a runaway with a bolter—or drop the ribbons—or make a mistake in clearing a gate, by being a little lushy—but you’ll never see Mrs. Nelson lying flat on her side in the middle of the road, with her insides gone to smash, and her outsides well distributed, because she’s been let go out of the yard without one of her pins.”
THE STAMP DUTY ON SCOTCH LINEN.