[223]
to plunge at once into some hidden and unknown spot, where we might spend two or three days quietly by ourselves; and remembering your Sunday at Stratford-on-Avon, I proposed that we should go there.
As Stratford, however, is off the railroad line, we determined to accept the invitation, which was lying by us, from our friend, Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, and take sanctuary with him. So we wrote on, intrusting him with the secret, and charging him on no account to let any one know of our arrival.
About night our cars whizzed into the depot at Birmingham; but just before we came in a difficulty was started in the company.
“Mr. Sturge is to be there waiting for us, but he does not know us and we don't know him; what is to be done?”
C. insisted that he should know him by instinct; and so, after we reached the depot, we told him to sally out and try. Sure enough, in a few moments he pitched upon a cheerful, middle-aged gentleman, with a moderate but not decisive broad brim to his hat, and challenged him as Mr. Sturge.
The result verified the truth that “instinct is a great matter.”
In a few moments our new friend and ourselves were snugly encased in a fly, trotting off as briskly as ever we could to his place at Edgbaston, nobody a whit the wiser.
You do not know how pleased we felt to think we had done it so nicely.
As we were drinking tea that evening, Elihu Burritt came in. It was the first time I had ever seen him, though I had heard a great deal of him from our friends in Edinburgh.
He is a man in middle life, tall and slender, with fair complexion, blue eyes, an air of
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Houghton, Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1889.
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