“Even so, my sluggardly Scot; faith! before the day even, for the day will be in a deuce of a hurry an' it catch up on us before we reach Pont-Opoise. Sop a crust in a jug of wine--I've had no better _petit déjeuner_ myself--put a clean cravat and a pair of hose in thy sack, and in all emulate the judicious flea that wastes no time in idle rumination, but transacts its affairs in a succession of leaps.” “And no time to say good-bye to anyone?” I asked, struggling into my toilet. “La! la! la! the flea never takes a _congé_ that I've heard on, Master Punctilio. Not so much as a kiss o' the hand for you; I have had news, and 'tis now or never.” Twenty minutes later, Thurot's landlord (for Thurot himself was from home) lit me to the courtyard, and the priest bundled me and my sack into the bowels of an enormous chariot waiting there. The clocks began to strike the hour of five; before the last stroke had ceased to shiver the darkness we were thundering along the sea front and my master was already composed to sleep in his corner, without vouchsafing me a sentence of explanation for so hurried a departure. Be sure my heart was sore! I felt the blackest of ingrates to be thus speeding without a sign of farewell from a place where I had met with so much of friendship. Out at the window of the coach I gazed, to see nothing but the cavernous night on one side, on the other, lit by the lanthorn, the flashing past of houses all shuttered and asleep. It was dry and pleasant weather, with a sting of frost in the air, and the propinquity of the sea manifest not in its plangent voice alone but in the odour of it that at that hour dominated the natural smells of the faubourgs. Only one glimpse I had of fellow creatures; as we passed the fort, the flare of flambeaux showed an enormous body of soldiers working upon the walls of Risebank; it but added to the poignance of my melancholy to reflect that here were my country's enemies unsleeping, and I made a sharp mental contrast of this most dauntening spectacle with a picture of the house of Hazel Den dreaming among its trees, and only crying lambs perhaps upon the moor to indicate that any life was there. Melancholy! oh, it was eerie beyond expression for me that morning! Outside, the driver talked to his horses and to some one with him on the boot; it must have been cheerier for him than for me as I sat in that sombre and close interior, jolted by my neighbour, and unable to refrain from rehabilitating all the past. Especially did I think of my dark home-coming with a silent father on the day I left the college to go back to the Mearns. And by a natural correlation, that was bound to lead to all that followed--even to the event for which I was now so miserably remote from my people.