form into sight, a dark train of melancholy thoughts swept across her mind like the shadows of clouds flitting along some peaceful meadow, and she trod the path with the sound of an ideal bell droning in her ears.
Thus the Sandboys travelled on to the house of John Coss, the cobbler post-boy, in the hopes of getting some sort of a conveyance over to Cockermouth. But though John Coss was nowhere to be met with, they were, luckily, just in time to catch the Loweswater post-master, who, finding that all the correspondence in that part of the country had come to an end, had stuck up a notice that the letter-*box at his office would be closed till after the Great Exhibition, and was then on his way, in the empty mail-cart, to the Cockermouth railway station.
Once at Cockermouth, the necessary preparations were soon made for the Sandboys' journey to the great metropolis. Jobby was shod, Cursty himself was breeched; Postlethwaite, Ann Lightfoot, and the "things" were duly removed from Hassness, and everything seemed to promise that the family really would enjoy themselves at last.
They were but just in time for obtaining their outfit. All the principal gentry and tradesmen had already left the town, and the smaller fry were making ready to follow the examples of their bigger brethren. The shutters of the Castle were closed, the mail-coach of "the General" had been put on the rails and carried to London, with "the Lord Paramount" shut up inside of it. At Derwent House the blinds had all been papered, and the gilt frames and chandeliers put into brown holland pinafores, while Lawyer Steel himself had pleaded a set-off, and moved himself, by writ of some kind or other, to the capital. The little grey pony, upon whose "body" Coroner Brag had so often "sat," had been put upon board-wages at the Globe Inn. Doctor Bell and his brother "Dickey," the cheerful, smiling, good-natured "medical men" of the town, had for a time ceased that friendly interchange of commodities which consisted in the giving of physic and the taking of wine with their several patients, and finding that their invalids had all taken to their "last legs,"—that the consumptions had gone galloping off—and that the declines had suddenly got out of "the last stage," and jumped into the first train, the Esculapian Adelphi had felt each other's pulse, and respectively prescribing a few weeks' change of air for their complaints, had both started after their patients, as lively as return hearses.
Even Jonathan Wood, the quondam Boniface, who, like Atlas of old, used to have the whole weight of "the Globe" on his shoulders, and had supported it till he had positively got red in the face—even jolly Jonathan himself had disappeared from the town. "The Sun," too, had lost all attraction to its attendant planets, who, no longer gravitating towards it, had flown off at a tangent to the metropolis.
But though there was neither heat nor light in the "Sun," at Cockermouth, still in the interior of the "Globe" there was a small fire, and here beside the grateful hobs of the cosey hostelry, Mr., Mrs., and the younger Sandboys located themselves until such time as all was ready for the start.
