our hotel, Heaven knows! but we did arrive there, in the last stage of exhaustion.  The driver of the carriage, whom we met next day, informed us that a gentleman had been thrown from his horse on the cliff-top and had broken his leg, and that, under the circumstances, he had ventured to disobey our instructions and take the poor fellow home.  Years afterwards I discovered that nothing of the kind had happened, but that the fiendish F. had given the driver a sovereign to play that trick upon us.  F. is a judge now, and has been lately trying election cases.  I wonder what he thinks of himself when he rebukes offenders for the heinous crime of bribery!

Again, I always thought H. a pleasant fellow till we went together to Cornwall.  He had gone through the first ordeal of a few days nearer home to my satisfaction, but at Penzance he broke out.  He was so dreadfully particular about his food that nothing satisfied him—­not even pilchards three times a day; and the way he went on at the waiters is not to be described by a decent pen.  The attendant at Penzance was not, I am bound to say, a good waiter.  He said, though he habitually put his thumb in every dish, he ‘hadn’t quite got his hand in,’ and was not used to the business.’  ‘Used! you know nothing about it!’ exclaimed H., viciously.  Then the poor fellow burst into tears.  ’Pray be patient with me, good gentlemen,’ he murmured.  ’I do my best; but until last Wednesday as ever was I was a pork-butcher.’  One cannot stand a travelling companion who makes the waiters cry.

The worst kind of fellow-traveller is one who, to use his own scientific phrase for his complaint, suffers from ’disorganisation of the nervous centres.’  At home his little weaknesses do not strike you.  You may not be on the spot when he flies across Piccadilly Circus, pursued, as he fancies, by a Brompton omnibus which has not yet reached St. James’s Church, and is moving at a snail’s pace; you may not have been with him on that occasion when, in his eagerness to be in time for the ‘Flying Dutchman,’ he arrives at Paddington an hour before it starts, and is put into the parliamentary train which is shunted at Slough to let the ‘Dutchman’ pass; but when you come to travel with him you know what ‘nerves’ are to your cost.  On the other hand, this is the easiest kind of travelling companion to get rid of; for you have only to feign a sore throat, with feverish symptoms, and off he flies on the wings of terror, leaving you, as he thinks—­if he has a thought except for his nervous centres—­to the tender mercies of a foreign doctor, to hireling nurses, and to a grave in the strangers’ cemetery.

THE END.