that would fill my soul would be such as cluster around “Home, Sweet Home.”  Jone was too much riled by the woman’s manner to be willing to let her think he had made a mistake, and he stopped her short.  “Look here,” he said to her, “I don’t ask you to come here to tell me anything about vehicles.  When I order any sort of a trap I want it.”  When I heard Jone say trap my soul lifted itself and I knew there was hope for us.  The stiffness melted right out of the landlady, and she began to look soft and gummy.

“If you want to take a drive in a four-in-hand coach, sir,” she said, “there’s two or three of them starts every morning from Trafalgar Square, and it’s not too late now, sir, if you go over there immediate.”

“Go?” said Jone, throwing himself into a chair, “I said, order one to come.  Where I live that sort of vehicle comes to the door for its passengers.”

The woman looked at Jone with a venerative uplifting of her eyebrows.  “I can’t say, sir, that a coach will come, but I’ll send the boy.  They go to Dorking, and Seven Oaks, and Virginia Water—­”

“I want to go to Virginia Water,” said Jone, as quick as lightning.

“Now, then,” said I, when the woman had gone, “what are you going to do if the coach comes?”

“Go to Virginia Water in it,” said Jone, “and when we come back we can go to the hotel.  I made a mistake, but I’ve got to stand by it or be called a greenhorn.”

I was in hopes the four-in-hand wouldn’t come, but in less than ten minutes there drove up to our door a four-horse coach which, not having half enough passengers, was glad to come such a little ways to get some more.  There was a man in a high hat and red coat, who was blowing a horn as the thing came around the corner, and just as I was looking into the coach and thinking we’d have it all to ourselves, for there was nobody in it, he put a ladder up against the top, and says he, touching his hat, “There’s a seat for you, madam, right next the coachman, and one just behind for the gentleman.  ’Tain’t often that, on a fine morning like this, such seats as them is left vacant on account of a sudden case of croup in a baronet’s family.”

I looked at the ladder and I looked at that top front seat, and I tell you, madam, I trembled in every pore, but I remembered then that all the respectable seats was on top, and the farther front the nobbier, and as there was a young woman sitting already on the box-seat, I made up my mind that if she could sit there I could, and that I wasn’t going to let Jone or anybody else see that I was frightened by style and fashion, though confronted by it so sudden and unexpected.  So up that ladder I went quick enough, having had practice in hay-mows, and sat myself down between the young woman and the coachman, and when Jone had tucked himself in behind me the horner blew his horn and away we went.

[Illustration:  “I looked at the ladder and at the top front seat”]