"I owe you very much, my good friend," said he to the officer, "for your timely assistance. To be frank, what you have just told me has indeed perplexed me not a little concerning the place where I proposed to stop. Is there no hotel in this neighborhood, where I could leave these ladies while I seek my friend?" Wonted to all manner of deceitfulness, and engaged in a calling which unavoidably makes one distrustful of mere appearances, however specious, however honest; the really good-hearted officer, now eyed Pierre in the dubious light with a most unpleasant scrutiny; and he abandoned the "Sir," and the tone of his voice sensibly changed, as he replied:--"There is no hotel in this neighborhood; it is too off the thoroughfares." "Come! come!"--cried the driver, now growing bold again--"though you're an officer, I'm a citizen for all that. You haven't any further right to keep me out of my bed now. He don't know where he wants to go to, cause he haint got no place at all to go to; so I'll just dump him here, and you dar'n't stay me." "Don't be impertinent now," said the officer, but not so sternly as before. "I'll have my rights though, I tell you that! Leave go of my arm; damn ye, get off the box; I've the law now. I say mister, come tramp, here goes your luggage," and so saying he dragged toward him a light trunk on the top of the stage. "Keep a clean tongue in ye now"--said the officer--"and don't be in quite so great a hurry," then addressing Pierre, who had now re-alighted from the coach--"Well, this can't continue; what do you intend to do?" "Not to ride further with that man, at any rate," said Pierre; "I will stop right here for the present." "He! he!" laughed the driver; "he! he! 'mazing 'commodating now--we hitches now, we do--stops right afore the watch-house--he! he!--that's funny!" "Off with the luggage then, driver," said the policeman--"here hand the small trunk, and now away and unlash there behind." During all this scene, Delly had remained perfectly silent in her trembling and rustic alarm; while Isabel, by occasional cries to Pierre, had vainly besought some explanation. But though their complete ignorance of city life had caused Pierre's two companions to regard the scene thus far with too much trepidation; yet now, when in the obscurity of night, and in the heart of a strange town, Pierre handed them out of the coach into the naked street, and they saw their luggage piled so near the white light of a watch-house, the same ignorance, in some sort, reversed its effects on them; for they little fancied in what really untoward and wretched circumstances they first touched the flagging of the city. As the coach lumbered off, and went rolling into the wide murkiness beyond, Pierre spoke to the officer. "It is a rather strange accident, I confess, my friend, but strange accidents will sometimes happen." "In the best of families," rejoined the other, a little ironically.