When arrived near home (at Grumpley, three miles from our village, where the “True Blue” generally stops to take a glass of ale at the Poppleton Arms) it was as if our Member, Mr. Poppleton himself, was come into the country, so great was the concourse of people assembled round the inn.  And there was the landlord of the inn and all the people of the village.  Then there was Tom Wheeler, the post-boy, from Mrs. Rincer’s posting-hotel in our town; he was riding on the old bay posters, and they, Heaven bless us! were drawing my aunt’s yellow chariot, in which she never went out but thrice in a year, and in which she now sat in her splendid cashmere shawl and a new hat and feather.  She waved a white handkerchief out of the window, and Tom Wheeler shouted out “Huzza!” as did a number of the little blackguard boys of Grumpley:  who, to be sure, would huzza for anything.  What a change on Tom Wheeler’s part, however!  I remembered only a few years before how he had whipped me from the box of the chaise, as I was hanging on for a ride behind.

Next to my aunt’s carriage came the four-wheeled chaise of Lieutenant Smith, R.N., who was driving his old fat pony with his lady by his side.  I looked in the back seat of the chaise, and felt a little sad at seeing that Somebody was not there.  But, O silly fellow! there was Somebody in the yellow chariot with my aunt, blushing like a peony, I declare, and looking so happy!—­oh, so happy and pretty!  She had a white dress, and a light blue and yellow scarf, which my aunt said were the Hoggarty colours; though what the Hoggartys had to do with light blue and yellow, I don’t know to this day.

Well, the “True Blue” guard made a great bellowing on his horn as his four horses dashed away; the boys shouted again; I was placed bodkin between Mrs. Hoggarty and Mary; Tom Wheeler cut into his bays; the Lieutenant (who had shaken me cordially by the hand, and whose big dog did not make the slightest attempt at biting me this time) beat his pony till its fat sides lathered again; and thus in this, I may say, unexampled procession, I arrived in triumph at our village.

My dear mother and the girls,—­Heaven bless them!—­nine of them in their nankeen spencers (I had something pretty in my trunk for each of them)—­could not afford a carriage, but had posted themselves on the road near the village; and there was such a waving of hands and handkerchiefs:  and though my aunt did not much notice them, except by a majestic toss of the head, which is pardonable in a woman of her property, yet Mary Smith did even more than I, and waved her hands as much as the whole nine.  Ah! how my dear mother cried and blessed me when we met, and called me her soul’s comfort and her darling boy, and looked at me as if I were a paragon of virtue and genius:  whereas I was only a very lucky young fellow, that by the aid of kind friends had stepped rapidly into a very pretty property.