It would afford but small pleasure to the reader were I to describe the journey by the mail-coach to London, and yet it was not without incidents which I still recollect with cheerfulness. The company consisted of three others besides myself; two of them were seated, before I reached the coach-office, on the back seat. One, an elderly, corpulently-inclined drysalter, Mr. Fustick, bent on some occasion of business to Carlisle. When he saw me at the door he made an apology for not resigning the back seat, by saying that when he was driven with his back to the horses he was always troubled with sea-sickness. His neighbour was a Greenock skipper, hastening to Liverpool to look after a vessel which had been cast away on the Calf of Man, the remains of which he was authorized to sell, as he informed us, for the benefit of the underwriters. The third had not yet come, but I was scarcely seated when he appeared at the door, attended by Mr. Spreul, an old Tontine acquaintance of mine, with half boots, the ears hanging out, and cotton stockings of “heavenly blue,” a staff under his arm, and in his best snuff-coloured coat and swandown waistcoat. He was attended by his handmaid Girzie, with a portmanteau under her arm, and a paper with comfits in her hand. The passenger, however, was his English relation, the afterwards justly renowned Mr. Cyril Thornton, then a smartly well-dressed young man, of a calm, engaging physiognomy, with a sly, or, what is a better term, a pawky devil lurking in the corner of his eye.