Isabella had not had an opportunity of writing to her husband, to acquaint him with the name of the vessel in which she would take her passage, nor when she would leave Newcastle; and, as they drew up in the pier, while the friends and relatives of other passengers thronged around them, to her no hand was extended. She stood as one deserted upon the threshold of the Nineveh of nations; and the crowds that passed before her seemed as the ghosts of solitude, giving tongues to bereavement, and forms to desolation. She felt herself alone in the midst of millions, solitary as a wearied bird whose wing has drooped in the wilderness. She went on shore, where she was immediately accosted by a hackney-coachman, whom she requested to convey her to a Mr Fulton’s in Cornhill, to whose care her husband had requested her to forward the letters she addressed to him. She was informed by the skipper that Cornhill was not above a mile and a half from the wharf; and, as the coach drove on, passing the bustling crowds who hurried along the streets, she forgot for a moment her own feelings in contemplation of the motley scene. The coach stopped facing the Mint, and the driver, leaving his box, spoke a few words with another coachman, who immediately drove rapidly in the direction of Watling Street. After a few minutes’ delay the coachman again mounted the box. She had never before looked upon a countenance where a grovelling and villanous soul had written in such broad and unblushing characters its own worthlessness. It was one of those countenances which it is hardly possible to pass upon the street without disliking. In it were pourtrayed meanness, servility, depravity, and deceit—it was purple with dissipation, and blotched with iniquity. She shuddered to find herself, though in the broad day, and in the midst of the metropolis, under the care of such a man. She began to feel conscious that they must have proceeded much farther than the distance mentioned by the skipper, and, with a degree of alarm, she inquired at the driver if he rightly understood where she wished to be set down. “Vy, yes,” replied he, “I knows the house well enough; it is Mr Fulton’s of Cornhill, an’t it?”