Frank Fairlegh | Page 2

what I told you about
wearing flannel waistcoats," cried my mother.
And with their united "God bless you, my boy!" still ringing in my ears,
I found myself inside the stage-coach, on my way to London.
Now, I am well aware that the correct thing for a boy in my situation
(i.e. leaving home for the first time) would be to fall back on his seat,
and into a reverie, during which, utterly lost to all external impressions,
he should entertain the thoughts and feelings of a well-informed man of
thirty; the same thoughts and feelings being clothed in ~2~~the
semi-poetic prose of a fashionable novel-writer. Deeply grieved,
therefore, am I at being forced both to set at nought so laudable an

established precedent, and to expose my own degeneracy. But the truth
must be told at all hazards. The only feeling I experienced, beyond a
vague sense of loneliness and desolation, was one of great personal
discomfort. It rained hard, so that a small stream of water, which
descended from the roof of the coach as I entered it, had insinuated
itself between one of the flannel waistcoats, which formed so important
an item in the maternal valediction, and my skin, whence,
endeavouring to carry out what a logician would call the "law of its
being," by finding its own level, it placed me in the undesirable
position of an involuntary disciple of the cold-water cure taking a
"sitz-bad". As to my thoughts, the reader shall have the full benefit of
them, in the exact order in which they flitted through my brain.
First came a vague desire to render my position more comfortable,
ending in a forlorn hope that intense and continued sitting might, by
some undefined process of evaporation, cure the evil. This suggested a
speculation, half pleasing and half painful, as to what would be my
mother's feelings could she be aware of the state of things; the pleasure
being the result of that mysterious preternatural delight which a boy
always takes in everything at all likely to injure his health, or endanger
his existence, and the pain arising from the knowledge that there was
now no one near me to care whether I was comfortable or not. Again,
these speculations merged into a sort of dreamy wonder, as to why a
queer little old gentleman opposite (my sole fellow-traveller) was
grunting like a pig, at intervals of about a minute, though he was wide
awake the whole time; and whether a small tuft of hair, on a mole at the
tip of his nose, could have anything to do with it. At this point my
meditations were interrupted by the old gentleman himself, who, after a
louder grunt than usual, gave vent to his feelings in the following
speech, which was partly addressed to me and partly a soliloquy.
"Umph! going to school, my boy, eh?" then, in a lower tone, "Wonder
why I called him my boy, when he's no such thing: just like me,
umph!"
I replied by informing him that I was not exactly going to school--(I
was nearly fifteen, and the word "school" sounded derogatory to my

dignity)--but that, having been up to the present time educated at home
by my father, I was now on my way to complete my studies under the
care of a private tutor, who only received six pupils, a very different
thing from a school, as I took the liberty of insinuating.
"Umph! different thing? You will cost more, learn less, and fancy
yourself a man when you are a boy; that's the only difference I can
see:" then came the aside--"Snubbing the poor child, when he's a peg
too low already, just like me; umph!"
After which he relapsed into a silence which continued uninterrupted
until we reached London, save once, while we were changing horses,
when he produced a flask with a silver top, and, taking a sip himself,
asked me if I drank brandy. On my shaking my head, with a smile
caused by what appeared to me the utter wildness and desperation of
the notion, he muttered:--
"Umph! of course he doesn't; how should he?--just like me".
In due course of time we reached the Old Bell Inn, Holborn, where the
coach stopped, and where my trunk and myself were to be handed over
to the tender mercies of the coachman of the Rocket, a fast coach (I
speak of the slow old days when railroads were unknown) which then
ran to Helmstone, the watering-place where my future tutor, the Rev.
Dr. Mildman, resided. My first impressions of London are scarcely
worth recording, for the simple reason that they consisted solely of
intense and unmitigated surprise at everything and everybody I saw and
heard; which may be more readily believed when I add