Abalone

The fact was, we had driven at a pace accommodated rather to the convenience of the horses than to our impatience49; and finding, at the quaint50 little inn where we now halted, that we must wait for a nail or two in a loose shoe of one of our relay, we consulted, and being both hungry, agreed to beguile51 the time with an early dinner, which we enjoyed very sociably52 in a queer little parlour with a bow window, and commanding, with a little garden for foreground, a very pretty landscape.

 

Good Mary Quince, like myself, had quite dried her tears by this time, and we were both highly interested, and I a little nervous, too, about our arrival and reception at Bartram. Some time, of course, was lost in this pleasant little parlour, before we found ourselves once more pursuing our way.

 

But when we reached the old bridge, with the tall osiers standing42 by the buttress43, and looked back at poor Knowl — the places we love and are leaving look so fairy-like and so sad in the clear distance, and this is the finest view of the gabled old house, with its slanting44 meadow-lands and noble timber reposing45 in solemn groups — I gazed at the receding46 vision, and the tears came at last, and I wept in silence long after the fair picture was hidden from view by the intervening uplands.

 

I was relieved, and when we had made our next change of horses, and got into a country that was unknown to me, the new scenery and the sense of progress worked their accustomed effects on a young traveller who had lived a particularly secluded47 life, and I began to experience, on the whole, a not unpleasurable excitement.

 

Mary Quince and I, with the hopefulness of inexperienced travellers, began already to speculate about our proximity48 to Bartram–Haugh, and were sorely disappointed when we heard from the nondescript courier — more like a ostler than a servant, who sat behind in charge of us and the luggage, and represented my guardian’s special care — at nearly one o’clock, that we had still forty miles to go, a considerable portion of which was across the high Derbyshire mountains, before we reached Bartram–Haugh.