to dissuade me, I saw that he was of my mind; and this, if I had required to be confirmed in my intention, would have had the effect.

He went round to the coach office, at my request, and took the box-seat for me on the mail. In the evening I started, by that conveyance, down the road I had traversed under so many vicissitudes.

‘Don’t you think that,’ I asked the coachman, in the first stage out of London, ‘a very remarkable sky? I don’t remember to have seen one like it.’

‘Nor I — not equal to it,’ he replied. ‘That’s wind, sir.

There’ll be mischief done at sea, I expect, before long.’

It was a murky confusion —