The events which I am about to relate took place between nine and
ten years ago. Sebastopol had fallen in the early spring, the peace
of Paris had been concluded since March, our commercial relations
with the Russian empire were but recently renewed; and I, returning
home after my first northward journey since the war, was well
pleased with the prospect of spending the month of December under
the hospitable and thoroughly English roof of my excellent friend,
Jonathan Jelf, Esq., of Dumbleton Manor, Clayborough, East Anglia.
Travelling in the interests of the wellknown firm in which it
is my lot to be a junior partner, I had been called upon to visit
not only the capitals of Russia and Poland, but had found it also
necessary to pass some weeks among the trading ports of the Baltic;
whence it came that the year was already far spent before I again
set foot on English soil, and that, instead of shooting pheasants
with him, as I had hoped, in October, I came to be my friend's
guest during the more genial Christmas-tide.

My voyage over, and a few days given up to business in Liverpool
and London, I hastened down to Clayborough with all the delight of
a school-boy whose holidays are at hand. My way lay by the Great
East Anglian line as far as Clayborough station, where I was to
be met by one of the Dumbleton carriages and conveyed across the
remaining nine miles of country. It was a fogey afternoon, singularly
warm for the 4th of December, and I had arranged to leave London by
the 4:15 express. The early darkness of winter had already closed
in; the lamps were lighted in the carriages; a clinging damp
dimmed the windows, adhered to the door-handles, and pervaded all
the atmosphere; while the gas-jets at the neighbouring book-stand