It was a night’s journey in those coach times, but we had the mail to ourselves and did not find the night very tedious.  It passed with me as I suppose it would with most people under such circumstances.  At one while my journey looked hopeful, and at another hopeless.  Now I thought I should do some good, and now I wondered how I could ever have supposed so.  Now it seemed one of the most reasonable things in the world that I should have come, and now one of the most unreasonable.  In what state I should find Richard, what I should say to him, and what he would say to me occupied my mind by turns with these two states of feeling; and the wheels seemed to play one tune (to which the burden of my guardian’s letter set itself) over and over again all night.

At last we came into the narrow streets of Deal, and very gloomy they were upon a raw misty morning.  The long flat beach, with its little irregular houses, wooden and brick, and its litter of capstans, and great boats, and sheds, and bare upright poles with tackle and blocks, and loose gravelly waste places overgrown with grass and weeds, wore as dull an appearance as any place I ever saw.  The sea was heaving under a thick white fog; and nothing else was moving but a few early ropemakers, who, with the yarn twisted round their bodies, looked as if, tired of their present state of existence, they were spinning themselves into cordage.

But when we got into a warm room in an excellent hotel and sat down, comfortably washed and dressed, to an early breakfast (for it was too late to think of going to bed), Deal began to look more cheerful.  Our little room was like a ship’s cabin, and that delighted Charley very much.  Then the fog began to rise like a curtain, and numbers of ships that we had had no idea were near appeared.  I don’t know how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the downs.  Some of these vessels were of grand size—­one was a large Indiaman just come home; and when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats pulling off from the shore to them and from them to the shore, and a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them, was most beautiful.

The large Indiaman was our great attraction because she had come into the downs in the night.  She was surrounded by boats, and we said how glad the people on board of her must be to come ashore.  Charley was curious, too, about the voyage, and about the heat in India, and the serpents and the tigers; and as she picked up such information much faster than grammar, I told her what I knew on those points.  I told her, too, how people in such voyages were sometimes wrecked and cast on rocks, where they were saved by the intrepidity and humanity of one man.  And Charley asking how that could be, I told her how we knew at home of such a case.