mail, blazing through the gloom, an evidence that my chance was not yet
lost. Past the time it was; but, by some rare accident, the mail was
not even yet ready to start. I ascended to my seat on the box, where my
cloak was still lying as it had lain at the Bridgewater Arms. I had
left it there in imitation of a nautical discoverer, who leaves a bit
of bunting on the shore of his discovery, by way of warning off the
ground the whole human race, and notifying to the Christian and the
heathen worlds, with his best compliments, that he has hoisted his
pocket-handkerchief once and for ever upon that virgin soil:
thenceforward claiming the _jus dominii_ to the top of the atmosphere
above it, and also the right of driving shafts to the centre of the
earth below it; so that all people found after this warning either
aloft in upper chambers of the atmosphere, or groping in subterraneous
shafts, or squatting audaciously on the surface of the soil, will be
treated as trespassers--kicked, that is to say, or decapitated, as
circumstances may suggest, by their very faithful servant, the owner of
the said pocket-handkerchief. In the present case, it is probable that
my cloak might not have been respected, and the _jus gentium_ might
have been cruelly violated in my person--for, in the dark, people
commit deeds of darkness, gas being a great ally of morality; but it so
happened that on this night there was no other outside passenger; and
thus the crime, which else was but too probable, missed fire for want
of a criminal.

Having mounted the box, I took a small quantity of laudanum, having
already travelled two hundred and fifty miles--viz., from a point
seventy miles beyond London. In the taking of laudanum there was
nothing extraordinary. But by accident it drew upon me the special
attention of my assessor on the box, the coachman. And in _that_
also there was nothing extraordinary. But by accident, and with great