To the best of my recollection, all the conversation that I heard from this taciturn person, was that sentence, so much the more remarkable for verity than originality, "Ask no questions, and I shall tell you no stories." Having nothing else to do in this my enforced _tete-a-tete_, I began to conjecture what next was to become of me. At first, I built no castles in the air; I had got quite sick of doing that aloud with my late school-fellows, and passing them all off as facts. Still, it must be confessed that my feelings were altogether pleasurable. It was a soul-cheering relief to have escaped from out of that vast labyrinth of lies that I had planted around me, and no longer to dread the rod-bearing Root; even novelty, under whatever form it may present itself, is always grateful to the young. In the midst of these agitations I again found myself in town; and I began to hope that I should once more see my foster-parents. I began to rally up my "little Latin and less Greek," in order to surprise the worthy sawyer and his wife; and I had fully determined to work out for him what the amount of his daily wages came to in a week, first by simple arithmetic, secondly by fractions, thirdly by decimals, and fourthly by duodecimals; and then to prove the whole correct by an algebraical equation. But all these triumphs of learning were not destined for me. I found, at length, that the glass coach drove up the inn-yard of some large coachmaster; but few words were said, and I was consigned to the coachman of one of the country stages, with as little remorse and as little ceremony as if I had been an ugly blear-eyed pug, forwarded in a basket, labelled "this side uppermost," to an old maiden aunt, or a superannuated grandmother. This was certainly unhandsome treatment to one who had been lately seriously telling his companions that he was a disguised prince of the blood, forced, for state reasons, to keep a strict incognito. It is true, that I travelled with four horses, and was attended by a guard; nay, that a flourish of music preceded my arrival at various points of my journey; but all these little less than royal honours I shared with a plebeian butcher, a wheezing and attenuated plumber and glazier, and other of his lieges, all very useful, but hardly deemed ornamental members of the body politic. CHAPTER NINETEEN. A CHAPTER OF DISAPPOINTMENTS, WHICH RALPH HOPES THE READER WILL NOT SHARE--SOME COMPARISONS WHICH HE HOPES WILL NOT BE FOUND ODIOUS, AND SOME REFLECTIONS WHICH HE THINKS CANNOT BE RESENTED.