... Immeasurable æons of time pass by. We are floating with rhythmic wings in the pure ether of some unterrestrial paradise. Our gross earthly integument (twelve stone and a few extra pounds avoirdupois of flesh and blood and bone) has fallen away. We want nothing to eat, for ever and ever, and have left everything gross and unspiritual far, far below us, and ... a fearful crash! Convulsively, instinctively, our arms are thrown out, and we awake, tenaciously grasping one another. What is this that has brought us down to earth again and made us unwillingly assume once more that corporeal hundredweight, or thereabouts, we had left so gladly behind? Are we overturned? No; it was nothing: nothing, that is to say, but the hunchbacked bridge over the river Welland, that leads from Stamford Baron into Stamford Town. It is only the customary bump and lurch, the guard informs us. May all architects of hunchback bridges be converted from straight-backed human beings into bowed and crooked likenesses of their own abominable creations! We will keep awake, lest another such rude awaking await us. With this intent we gaze, wide-eyed, upon Stamford Town, its noble buildings wrapped round in midnight quiet, the moon shining here full upon the mullioned stone windows of some ancient mansion, there casting impenetrable black shadows, making dark mysteries of grand architectural doorways decorated with curious scutcheons and overhung with heavy pediments, like beetling eyebrows. Grand churches whose spires soar away, away far into the sky, astonish our newly-awakened vision as the coachman carefully guides the coach through the narrow and crooked streets, in which the shadows from cornices and roof-tops lie so black and sharp that none but he who has driven here before could surely bring this coach safely through. Once or twice we have quailed as he has driven straight at some solid wall, and have breathed again when it has proved to be only some oblique monstrous silhouetted image cast athwart the way. Fear only leaves us when we are clear of the town and once more on the unobstructed road; then only is there leisure for the mind to dwell upon the beauties of that glorious old stone-built town. We are thus ruminating when, between Great Casterton and Stretton, where we enter Rutlandshire, the glaring lamps of a swiftly approaching coach lurch forward out of the long perspective of road, and, with a clatter of harness and a sharp crunching of wheels, fall away, as in a vision. The guard, answering someone’s question, says it is the Leeds “Rockingham,” due in London at something after ten in the morning.