I left London by one of the early Exeter coaches, and the first free taste of the untainted air, with the contentment which gladdens on the aspect of the country in a fine morning, had soon a sympathetic influence on my spirits. My imagination was filled with pleasing anticipations, in which the anxieties of trade had no place; and all day I enjoyed an inward calm, almost as delightful as the pleasures of earnest activity. In descending, however, a hill in the twilight, this serenity was abruptly disturbed, by the coach coming in contact with a ponderous waggon, which was slowly groaning upward, and disastrously overset—I emphatically say disastrously; for, although no injury was sustained by any of the other passengers, my forehead was so cut by the glass of one of the windows, that I was obliged to be left behind; and this accident coloured the tissue of my subsequent life.

The place at which the accident happened was near a respectable house, something in appearance like those of the better order of farms, but not altogether of that character, for the offices betokened a small establishment; no ricks were in the yard, and the little plat of ground between the door and the highway, was rather more trimly dressed and planted than the farmers are in the habit of doing to the environs of their premises.