told me, or (as a matter of no great interest) I had forgotten her
surname. It is a general practice, indeed, with girls of humble rank in
her unhappy condition, not (as novel-reading women of higher pretensions)
to style themselves _Miss Douglas_, _Miss Montague_, &c., but simply by
their Christian names--_Mary_, _Jane_, _Frances_, &c. Her surname, as
the surest means of tracing her hereafter, I ought now to have inquired;
but the truth is, having no reason to think that our meeting could, in
consequence of a short interruption, be more difficult or uncertain than
it had been for so many weeks, I had scarcely for a moment adverted to it
as necessary, or placed it amongst my memoranda against this parting
interview; and my final anxieties being spent in comforting her with
hopes, and in pressing upon her the necessity of getting some medicines
for a violent cough and hoarseness with which she was troubled, I wholly
forgot it until it was too late to recall her.

It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Gloucester Coffee-house, and
the Bristol mail being on the point of going off, I mounted on the
outside. The fine fluent motion {5} of this mail soon laid me asleep: it
is somewhat remarkable that the first easy or refreshing sleep which I
had enjoyed for some months, was on the outside of a mail-coach--a bed
which at this day I find rather an uneasy one. Connected with this sleep
was a little incident which served, as hundreds of others did at that
time, to convince me how easily a man who has never been in any great
distress may pass through life without knowing, in his own person at
least, anything of the possible goodness of the human heart--or, as I
must add with a sigh, of its possible vileness. So thick a curtain of
_manners_ is drawn over the features and expression of men's _natures_,
that to the ordinary observer the two extremities, and the infinite field
of varieties which lie between them, are all confounded; the vast and
multitudinous compass of their several harmonies reduced to the meagre