packet, twelve hundred tons burthen per register, bound for Halifax
and Boston, and carrying Her Majesty's mails.

That this state-room had been specially engaged for 'Charles
Dickens, Esquire, and Lady,' was rendered sufficiently clear even
to my scared intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the
fact, which was pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin
mattress, spread like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible
shelf. But that this was the state-room concerning which Charles
Dickens, Esquire, and Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences
for at least four months preceding: that this could by any
possibility be that small snug chamber of the imagination, which
Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the spirit of prophecy strong upon
him, had always foretold would contain at least one little sofa,
and which his lady, with a modest yet most magnificent sense of its
limited dimensions, had from the first opined would not hold more
than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd corner out of sight
(portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at the door, not to
say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or forced into a
flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless,
and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or
connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous
little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished
lithographic plan hanging up in the agent's counting-house in the
city of London: that this room of state, in short, could be
anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of the captain's,
invented and put in practice for the better relish and enjoyment of
the real state-room presently to be disclosed:- these were truths
which I really could not, for the moment, bring my mind at all to
bear upon or comprehend. And I sat down upon a kind of horsehair