our appearance: for we passed all objects at too flying a pace, and
through darkness too profound, to allow of any one feature in our
equipage being distinctly noticed. Ten miles out of town, a space which
we traversed in forty-four minutes, a second relay of horses was ready;
but we carried on the same postilions throughout. Six miles ahead of
this distance we had a second relay; and with this set of horses, after
pushing two miles further along the road, we crossed by a miserable
lane five miles long, scarcely even a bridge road, into another of the
great roads from the capital; and by thus crossing the country, we came
back upon the city at a point far distant from that at which we left
it. We had performed a distance of forty-two miles in three hours, and
lost a fourth hour upon the wretched five miles of cross-road. It was,
therefore, four o'clock, and broad daylight, when we drew near the
suburbs of the city; but a most happy accident now favored us; a fog
the most intense now prevailed; nobody could see an object six feet
distant; we alighted in an uninhabited new-built street, plunged into
the fog, thus confounding our traces to any observer. We then stepped
into a hackney-coach which had been stationed at a little distance.
Thence, according to our plan, we drove to a miserable quarter of the
town, whither the poor only and the wretched resorted; mounted a gloomy
dirty staircase, and, befriended by the fog, still growing thicker and
thicker, and by the early hour of the morning, reached a house
previously hired, which, if shocking to the eye and the imagination
from its squalid appearance and its gloom, still was a home--a
sanctuary--an asylum from treachery, from captivity, from persecution.
Here Pierpoint for the present quitted us: and once more Agnes, Hannah,
and I, the shattered members of a shattered family, were thus gathered
together in a house of our own.

Yes: once again, daughter of the hills, thou sleptst as heretofore in