cunningly set to inveigle all the draughts in that country-side,
and to communicate a special intensity and velocity to them as they
rotate in two hurricanes: one, about my wretched head: one, about
my wretched legs. The training of the young ladies behind the
counter who are to restore me, has been from their infancy directed
to the assumption of a defiant dramatic show that I am NOT
expected. It is in vain for me to represent to them by my humble
and conciliatory manners, that I wish to be liberal. It is in vain
for me to represent to myself, for the encouragement of my sinking
soul, that the young ladies have a pecuniary interest in my
arrival. Neither my reason nor my feelings can make head against
the cold glazed glare of eye with which I am assured that I am not
expected, and not wanted. The solitary man among the bottles would
sometimes take pity on me, if he dared, but he is powerless against
the rights and mights of Woman. (Of the page I make no account,
for, he is a boy, and therefore the natural enemy of Creation.)
Chilling fast, in the deadly tornadoes to which my upper and lower
extremities are exposed, and subdued by the moral disadvantage at
which I stand, I turn my disconsolate eyes on the refreshments that
are to restore me. I find that I must either scald my throat by
insanely ladling into it, against time and for no wager, brown hot
water stiffened with flour; or I must make myself flaky and sick
with Banbury cake; or, I must stuff into my delicate organisation,
a currant pincushion which I know will swell into immeasurable
dimensions when it has got there; or, I must extort from an iron-
bound quarry, with a fork, as if I were farming an inhospitable
soil, some glutinous lumps of gristle and grease, called pork-pie.
While thus forlornly occupied, I find that the depressing banquet
on the table is, in every phase of its profoundly unsatisfactory
character, so like the banquet at the meanest and shabbiest of