Nobody had; and as the proposition was warmly seconded by Perker,

who considered it extremely probable that if Mr Pickwick saw a little

change and gaiety he would be inclined to think better of his

determination, and worse of a debtor's prison, it was carried

unanimously; and Sam was at once despatched to the White Horse

Cellar, to take five places by the half-past seven o'clock coach, next

morning.

There were just two places to be had inside, and just three to be had

out; so Sam Weller booked for them all, and having exchanged a few

compliments with the booking-office clerk on the subject of a pewter

half-crown which was tendered him as a portion of his 'change,'

walked back to the George and Vulture, where he was pretty busily

employed until bed-time in reducing clothes and linen into the

smallest possible compass, and exerting his mechanical genius in

constructing a variety of ingenious devices for keeping the lids on

boxes which had neither locks nor hinges.

The next was a very unpropitious morning for a journey - muggy,

damp, and drizzly. The horses in the stages that were going out, and

had come through the city, were smoking so, that the outside

passengers were invisible. The newspaper-sellers looked moist, and

smelled mouldy; the wet ran off the hats of the orange-vendors as they

thrust their heads into the coach windows, and diluted the insides in

a refreshing manner. The Jews with the fifty-bladed penknives shut

them up in despair; the men with the pocket-books made pocket-

books of them. Watch- guards and toasting-forks were alike at a

discount, and pencil- cases and sponges were a drug in the market.

Leaving Sam Weller to rescue the luggage from the seven or eight

porters who flung themselves savagely upon it, the moment the coach

stopped, and finding that they were about twenty minutes too early,

Mr Pickwick and his friends went for shelter into the travellers' room -

the last resource of human dejection.

The travellers' room at the White Horse Cellar is of course

uncomfortable; it would be no travellers' room if it were not. It is the

right-hand parlour, into which an aspiring kitchen fireplace appears

to have walked, accompanied by a rebellious poker, tongs, and shovel.

It is divided into boxes, for the solitary confinement of travellers, and

is furnished with a clock, a looking-glass, and a live waiter, which

latter article is kept in a small kennel for washing glasses, in a corner

of the apartment.

One of these boxes was occupied, on this particular occasion, by a

stern-eyed man of about five-and-forty, who had a bald and glossy

forehead, with a good deal of black hair at the sides and back of his

head, and large black whiskers. He was buttoned up to the chin in a

The Pickwick Papers